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Dessert

English Walnut Cake

A sweet cake made with sugar, butter, flour, corn starch, baking powder, egg whites, lemon flavoring, and chopped English walnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 349 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

English Walnut 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 and butter.

  3. Add the water, flour, corn starch, baking powder, and lemon flavoring to the batter. Mix the batter well.

  4. Beat the egg whites in a separate bowl until stiff peaks form. Fold the beaten egg whites into the batter.

  5. Pour the batter into prepared cake pans and bake the cakes until golden.

Make the walnut filling

  1. Combine the light brown sugar and water in a saucepan for the filling. Boil the mixture until it threads.

  2. Stir in the egg whites. Beat the mixture until creamy.

  3. Fold in the chopped walnuts.

Assemble

  1. Use the walnut mixture as filling between the cake 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. Corn + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together349 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + corntop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 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
Whipped whites give the cake its light, airy structure.
Butter
Creaming with sugar traps air and adds richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises.
Light brown sugar
Dissolved and boiled with water to form the sweet, thick filling base.
English walnuts
Add texture and nutty flavor to the filling.

The step that matters

Boil the filling syrup until it threads. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration; underheating leaves the filling runny, while overheating makes it hard and grainy once it cools.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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

More walnut cake recipes

Chocolate 9Date 7Filling 7English 6Raisin 4Sour Cream 3 See all 162 →

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