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Dessert

Spunge Cake

A cake made with sugar, eggs, flour, lemon peel, caraway seeds, rose water, and brandy, baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and caraway match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,435 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Spunge 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 syrup

  1. Boil 1 pint of water with ¾ pound of sugar until cold.

Make the batter

  1. Whisk the cooled sugar with the beaten yolks of 9 eggs for 1 hour.

  2. Gently stir in 1 pound of dried flour, lemon peel, and caraway seeds.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered and floured tin.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1 hour.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + carawaytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together270 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Lemon + rosetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Caraway + rosetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together93 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whisked yolks trap air and give the sponge its light, airy structure.
Dried flour
Forms the gluten network that sets the crumb once baked.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps the whisked foam hold its volume.

The step that matters

Whisking the eggs and sugar. Whisking the yolks with the cooled sugar for a long time builds the foam that makes a sponge rise. If the foam collapses, the cake bakes up dense, so the flour must be folded in gently to keep the air.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, flour, caraway, rose, 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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