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Dessert

Currant Cake

A sweet cake made with butter, sugar, eggs, lemon, flour, baking soda, and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Currant Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Gradually add the sugar and beat until creamy.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks until lemon colored.

  4. In another bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff and dry.

  5. Combine the egg yolks with the creamed mixture.

  6. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

  7. Add the grated lemon rind and lemon juice.

  8. Sift together the flour and baking soda, then fold into the mixture.

  9. Dredge the currants in 1 tablespoon of flour and fold them into the batter.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a deep cake pan.

  2. Bake at 300°F (150°C) for 1½ 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.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

Eggs
Whites trapped by beating give the cake lift and an airy, light crumb.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and a tender texture to the crumb.
Sugar
Beaten with butter it sweetens the cake and helps create a creamy, aerated base.
All-purpose flour
Its proteins set during baking, giving the cake its structure.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidity of the lemon to help the cake rise.
Currants
Scattered through the batter, they add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Egg whites hold the air that makes the cake rise. Vigorous stirring deflates them, leaving a dense, flat cake.

Swap the currant

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

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

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