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Dessert

Egg and Sponge Cake

A slice of sponge cake topped with a custard made from boiled milk, egg white, yolk, sugar, and flavored with essence.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Egg and Sponge Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Beat the egg white until stiff.

  3. Scald the beaten egg white in the boiling milk.

  4. Stir the beaten egg yolk with the sugar until combined.

  5. Let the mixture boil briefly.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over a slice of sponge cake.

  2. Flavor with the essence before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens as it heats with the egg.
Egg white
Beaten to stiffness, it adds a light, airy texture to the custard.
Egg yolk
Thickens the mixture as it heats and adds richness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the flavor of the egg.

The step that matters

Let the mixture boil briefly.. Egg yolk thickens as it heats but can curdle if overheated, so only a brief boil is needed to set it smoothly.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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