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Dessert

Pork Cake

A sweet pork cake made with pork, sugar, molasses, flour, spices, and dried fruits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Pork Cake

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pork Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pour boiling water over the pork and let it cool.

Make the batter

  1. Add brown sugar, sorghum molasses, flour, baking soda, cloves, cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg to the cooled mixture.

  2. Mix in the currants, raisins, citron, lemon, and orange.

  3. Flour the fruit before adding it to the mixture.

  4. Mix everything by hand until well combined.

Bake

  1. If baking in one loaf, bake for 4 to 5 hours.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Sorghum + cinnamontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together45 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  5. Sorghum + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together99 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Clear fat pork
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the cake tender and moist as it bakes.
Sorghum molasses
Adds moisture, deep sweetness, and dark color to the cake.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic molasses to release gas that helps the cake rise.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cake brown.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Flour the fruit before adding it to the mixture. Coating the fruit in flour helps it stay suspended in the batter instead of sinking to the bottom during baking.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, sugar, sorghum, molasses, flour, clove, cinnamon):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Allspicethe original
  3. Gingerfits about as well
  4. Cardamomfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, sugar, sorghum, molasses, flour, clove, cinnamon. 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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