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Dessert

Dolly Varden Cake

A layered cake with dark and white batters, lemon cream, and meringue topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 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 ↓

Dolly Varden 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.

Prepare the batters

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

  2. In a bowl, mix the egg yolks, sugar, flour, butter, water, citron, raisins, whiskey, spices, and baking powder.

  3. In another bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff.

  4. In a separate bowl, cream the butter, then add water, sugar, flour, and baking powder to make the white part.

Bake the layers

  1. Grease jelly tins and pour in the dark batter, then the white batter.

  2. Bake until golden.

Make the lemon cream and assemble

  1. For the lemon cream, combine lemon juice, lemon rind, sugar, and beaten eggs in a saucepan and cook until thick, stirring constantly.

  2. Spread the lemon cream between the layers, alternating dark and white.

  3. Top with meringue and bake until the meringue is lightly browned.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter 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

Egg yolks
Add richness and colour to the dark batter and help bind it.
Butter
Adds fat and tenderness to both the dark and white batters.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the layers together.
Baking powder
Makes the batters rise so the layers are light rather than dense.
Egg whites
Beaten until stiff to lighten the topping and give it volume.
Lemon juice and rind
Provides acidity and aroma that cut the sweetness of the cream.

The step that matters

Cooking the lemon cream. The eggs in the lemon cream can scramble if heated too fast. Cooking gently over low heat while stirring constantly lets the eggs thicken the cream smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Coconutfits about as well

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