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Baking

White Mountain Cake

A cake made with butter, cornstarch, sweet milk, sugar, flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

White Mountain 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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the butter and sugar until creamy.

  2. Add the cornstarch and mix well.

  3. Dissolve the baking soda in the milk and add it to the mixture.

  4. Gradually add the flour and cream of tartar, mixing until smooth.

  5. Fold in the egg whites gently.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into four square cake tins.

  2. Bake until golden and a toothpick comes out clean.

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

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped whites trap air that lifts the cake and gives it an airy structure.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and carries flavor.
Cornstarch
Softens the flour's gluten, giving a finer, more tender crumb.
Cream of tartar
Acid that stabilizes the egg whites and reacts with baking soda to help rising.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to release gas that helps the cake rise.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg whites gently. Egg whites hold air that makes the cake light. Stirring vigorously knocks that air out, so the cake bakes up dense and heavy instead of airy.

“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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