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Tea-Cakes

A sweet bread cake with raisins, nutmeg, and butter, baked in tins after rising.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,377 recipes. Both carry alpha-terpineol, which smells lilac, floral. The science ↓

Tea-Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make and shape

  1. Form the dough and let it rise as for rolls.

  2. Divide it into cakes and bake them in tins, or roll out the dough and bake the cakes on buttered tins.

  3. Mix in the raisins, nutmeg, and sugar well with the dough.

  4. Put the dough in tins, filling them about three-quarters full.

Rise and bake

  1. Let it rise for an hour and a half, then bake.

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. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bread dough
Forms the base structure, and its yeast rise gives the cakes their light, airy crumb.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness, and helps the tins and cakes brown.
Raisins
Add sweetness, moisture, and chewy pockets throughout the dough.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the dough.

The step that matters

Filling the tins about three-quarters full. Yeast dough keeps expanding during the second rise and in the oven. Leaving room in the tin lets it grow upward without overflowing or baking into a dense, misshapen cake.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, nutmeg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinthe original
  4. Lemonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, nutmeg, sugar. 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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