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Dessert

Dundee Cake

A buttery fruit cake with raisins, almonds, candied peel, and lemon rind baked at 200°C.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Dundee Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the batter

  1. Beat butter and sugar together until creamy.

  2. Add one egg and mix well, repeating until all eggs are incorporated.

  3. Gradually add flour while mixing for about 20 minutes.

  4. Stir in the sultanas, lemon rind, and chopped peel.

Fill and bake

  1. Line a cake tin with buttered paper and fill it with the mixture.

  2. Slice the blanched almonds and arrange them on top.

  3. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for 1.5 hours.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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 add richness and a tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and moisture as the cake sets.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a light, creamed texture.
Sultana raisins
Add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Adding the flour gradually while mixing. Adding flour slowly and mixing gently keeps the batter smooth and avoids overdeveloping gluten, which would make the cake tough.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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