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Dessert

Berwick Sponge Cake

A sponge cake made with eggs, sugar, flour, lemon, baking soda, and cream of tartar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Berwick Sponge Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs for 2 minutes.

  2. Add the sugar and beat for 6 minutes.

  3. Mix in 2 cups of flour and cream of tartar, and beat for 1 minute.

  4. Combine the cold water and baking soda, then beat for 1 minute.

  5. Add the lemon rind, lemon juice, and 2 more cups of flour, along with salt.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 20 minutes.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Eggs
Beaten to trap air, giving the cake its light, airy structure.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and gluten that set the cake's structure as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, beaten with the eggs, helps hold air in the batter.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the batter, stabilising the beaten egg foam and keeping it airy.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic ingredients to release gas, helping the cake rise.

The step that matters

Beating the eggs and sugar. Sponge cakes depend on air whipped into the eggs and sugar for lift, since there is little other leavening. Under-beating leaves a dense cake, and over-deflating the batter when adding flour and liquids loses that lift.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, flour, cream):

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

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

“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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