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Dessert

Raisin Cake

A layered cake made with sugar, egg whites, butter, sweet milk, flour, baking powder, lemon flavoring, raisins, and a sugar‑egg white icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Raisin 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. In a bowl, cream together the sugar, butter, and egg whites.

  3. Add the sweet milk, flour, baking powder, and lemon flavoring; mix well.

  4. Pour the batter into layers and bake until golden.

Make the icing and finish

  1. For the icing, boil 1 cup of sugar with a little water until it forms a string.

  2. Remove from heat and pour over the beaten egg white, mixing until it resembles icing.

  3. Fold in the chopped raisins and spread the icing on 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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

Egg whites
Add structure and lift to the cake and whip into the icing for a light texture.
Butter
Adds fat for tender crumb and richness in the cake.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the layers rise and turn light.
White sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown while it bakes.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot sugar syrup over the egg white. The syrup must reach the string stage and be poured slowly while beating, otherwise the egg white can stay runny or cook unevenly, so the icing will not thicken into a smooth, spreadable texture.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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