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Dessert

Hickory Nut Cake

A cake made with butter, flour, powdered sugar, egg whites, and hickory nuts, topped with a hickory nut frosting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Hickory Nut 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. Cream the butter and powdered sugar together.

  3. Add the baking powder, flour, milk, and egg whites in the order given, mixing well.

  4. Fold in the chopped hickory nuts.

  5. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake until golden.

Make the filling and frosting

  1. For the filling and frosting, boil the powdered sugar and water until it creams when a little is stirred on a saucer.

  2. Remove from heat and beat until partly cool, then add the chopped hickory nuts.

  3. Beat until cool enough to spread 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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
Creamed with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Egg whites
Add structure and lift as they set in the oven, helping the cake hold its shape.
Flour
Forms the cake's main structure once heated and set.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise in the oven.
Hickory nuts
Add crunch and a nutty flavor to the cake and the frosting.

The step that matters

Boil the powdered sugar and water to the creaming stage. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration before it is beaten. Underboiled syrup stays runny and will not thicken to spread, while overboiled syrup turns stiff and grainy as it cools.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Milletfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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