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Dessert

A Very Good Seed-cake

A buttery seed cake with caraway, mace, nutmeg, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

A Very Good Seed-cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the butter to a cream.

  2. Dredge the butter in the flour.

  3. Add the sugar, mace, nutmeg, and caraway seeds, and mix well.

  4. Whisk the eggs.

  5. Stir in the brandy.

  6. Beat the mixture for 10 minutes.

Bake

  1. Put the batter into a tin lined with buttered paper.

  2. Bake for 1 to 2 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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Nutmeg + carawaytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together200 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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, it traps air and gives the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Provide structure as they set in the oven, and add moisture and richness.
Flour
Forms the cake's main structure once the batter sets during baking.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps hold air in the creamed butter.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavour, and its alcohol evaporates during baking.
Caraway seeds
Provide the distinctive aromatic flavour that defines this cake.

The step that matters

Beating the butter to a cream. Beating softened butter with sugar traps tiny air bubbles that expand in the oven and lighten the crumb. Under-beaten butter yields a dense cake, so the butter should look pale and fluffy before the other ingredients are added.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, sugar, nutmeg, flour, caraway, brandy. 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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