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Dessert

Gentleman's Jelly Cake

A cake made with butter, sugar, flour, eggs, and topped with apple jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Gentleman's Jelly 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. Beat the egg whites and yolks separately.

  2. Cream together the butter and sugar.

  3. Add the water, flour, baking powder, and salt to the creamed mixture.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

  5. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

Make the jelly

  1. For the jelly, combine 1 egg, 1 cup sugar, grated apples, and lemon juice in a saucepan.

  2. Stir the mixture over heat until it boils, then cool before spreading on the cake.

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. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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

Eggs
Whites trapped with air give the cake its light, risen structure, and yolks add richness.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and adds tenderness and richness to the crumb.
Flour
Its proteins set during baking to form the cake's structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender texture when creamed with butter.
Grated apples
Their pectin helps the jelly thicken and set when cooked.

The step that matters

Stir the jelly until it boils. The jelly must reach a full boil so the pectin and sugar can thicken it properly; cooling before spreading lets it set to a spreadable consistency.

Swap the apple

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

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

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