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Dessert

Crumb Cake

A cake made with sugar, shortening, flour, eggs, milk, baking powder, salt, and flavoring, topped with reserved crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Crumb Cake

Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Crumb Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

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

Make the batter

  1. Mix the sugar, shortening, baking powder, salt, and flour together until crumbly.

  2. Set aside 1 cup of the crumbs.

  3. Add the beaten egg yolks, milk, and flavoring to the remaining crumbs.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites last.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a cake pan and cover with the reserved crumbs.

  2. Bake for about 45 minutes.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, with the whites lightening the batter when folded in.
Shortening
Adds fat for a tender crumb and helps coat the flour in the crumbly mixture.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps the crumb brown lightly during baking.
Milk
Adds moisture and hydrates the flour to form the batter.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites last. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the egg whites. Stirring them in hard deflates the foam, which reduces the lift the cake gets from the whites.

“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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