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Dessert

Pound Cake

A sweet cake made with sugar, butter, eggs, flour, brandy, mace, lemon rind, and frosted with sugar, water, egg white, and rose flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Pound Cake

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 ↓

Pound 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. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  3. Stir in the flour, brandy, mace, and grated lemon rind.

  4. Pour the batter into a greased pan and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 45 minutes.

Make the frosting

  1. For the frosting, boil the granulated sugar and boiling water for 5 minutes.

  2. Remove from heat and add the beaten egg white and rose flavoring.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Mace + rosetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together498 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Brandy + rosetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together560 recipes

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

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

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Add structure and richness as they set during baking, binding the batter.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a fine texture when creamed with butter.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs one at a time. Beating each egg in fully before the next keeps the emulsion stable. If eggs are added too quickly, the batter can curdle, which may affect the cake's texture.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

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