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Lunch Loaf Cake

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lunch Loaf Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cream together the butter and powdered sugar.

  2. Add part of the flour, milk, and beaten egg yolks; mix well.

  3. Incorporate the remaining flour, egg whites, wine, spices, raisins, citron, and the juice of the fresh lemon.

  4. Add 1 teaspoon of baking powder for every cup of flour used.

  5. If the wine is sour, add ½ teaspoon of baking soda.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, milk, egg, flour, wine, raisin):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, milk, egg, flour, wine, raisin. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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