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Hickory-nut Custard Cake

A layered cake with hickory nuts and custard filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Hickory-nut Custard Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cake

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, sweet milk, flour, baking powder, and lemon flavoring; mix well.

  3. Pour the batter into jelly pans and bake until golden.

Make the custard and assemble

  1. For the custard, heat the milk in a tin pail set in boiling water.

  2. Stir in the dissolved cornstarch, eggs, and sugar until combined.

  3. Add the chopped hickory nuts and mix well.

  4. Spread the custard between the layers of the warm cake.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Add structure and richness to the batter and thicken the custard as it sets.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake batter.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and stays light.
Cornstarch
Thickens the custard so it holds its shape between the cake layers.
Hickory nut meats
Add crunch and a rich, nutty flavour to the custard filling.

The step that matters

Heating the custard milk. Heating the milk gently in a water bath keeps it from scorching on the bottom. Cornstarch needs to be fully dissolved first so it thickens smoothly without lumps once combined with the eggs and sugar.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, milk, flour, meat. 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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