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Dessert

Apple Sauce Cake

A loaf cake made with sour apple sauce, raisins, and spices, baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Apple Sauce 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 batter

  1. Cream together the sugar and shortening.

  2. Add salt, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and raisins. Mix well.

  3. Dissolve baking soda in warm water, then stir into the sour apple sauce until it foams.

  4. Combine the foamed apple sauce with the other ingredients and beat thoroughly.

  5. Gradually add the sifted flour and mix until smooth.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a loaf tin.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 45 minutes.

  3. If the apple sauce is not very sour, add a little vinegar or cream of tartar.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour apple sauce to produce gas that lifts the batter.
Sour apple sauce
Provides moisture and acidity that activates the baking soda and keeps the crumb tender.
Shortening
Creaming with sugar traps air and adds fat for a tender texture.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender, lightly aerated crumb when creamed.

The step that matters

Dissolving the baking soda and folding it into the sour apple sauce until it foams. Baking soda only leavens when it meets an acid. Stirring it into the acidic sour apple sauce before combining the batter lets the reaction produce gas that lifts the cake, so the sauce must be sour enough to react.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, raisin, sauce, flour):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, raisin, sauce, 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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