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Dessert

Minnehaha Cake

A layered cake with a sugar glaze and raisin filling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Minnehaha 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.

Make the cake

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

  2. Cream together the granulated sugar and softened butter.

  3. Add the egg whites (or whole eggs) and mix well.

  4. Stir in the cream of tartar, flour, baking soda, and sweet milk until combined.

  5. Divide the batter into layers and bake until golden.

Make the filling

  1. For the filling, boil together 1 cup of sugar and ½ cup of water until it reaches a brittle stage in cold water.

  2. Remove from heat and quickly stir into the well-beaten egg whites.

  3. Fold in the chopped raisins or hickory nuts.

  4. Spread the filling between the baked layers.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Butter
Creams with the sugar to add richness and a tender crumb.
Egg whites
Provide structure and lift to the batter, and form the airy base of the filling.
All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the cake layers.
Cream of tartar
Stabilizes the whipped egg whites and helps keep the cake tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic ingredients to help the layers rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, boiled with water, forms the filling's candy-like texture.

The step that matters

Boiling the filling syrup. The sugar and water must reach the brittle stage to set properly. Pouring the syrup in quickly while it is hot lets it cook the beaten egg whites, giving a firm, glossy filling rather than a runny one.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Coconutfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

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