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Bride Cake

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Bride Cake

Why it works: Nutmeg and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,115 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Bride Cake

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cream the butter in a large bowl.

  2. Gradually beat in the sugar for about 30 minutes.

  3. Whip the egg whites until very frothy and mix with the butter and sugar.

  4. Beat the egg yolks for at least 30 minutes and add to the mixture.

  5. Incorporate the flour, mace, and nutmeg, and continue beating until the oven is ready.

  6. Stir in the brandy, then gently fold in the currants and almonds.

  7. Prepare your cake pans by tying three sheets of paper around the bottoms to prevent leakage and greasing them with butter.

  8. Layer the cake batter with the sweetmeats in three layers, ensuring cake is between each layer.

  9. Bake for three hours, covering with paper once it has risen and colored.

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. Nutmeg + almondtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Nutmeg + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, nutmeg, egg, currant, almond, orange):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, nutmeg, egg, currant, almond, orange. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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