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Dessert

Madeira Cakes

A cake made with flour, ground rice, butter, sugar, eggs, baking powder, lemon extract, milk, topped with citron peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Madeira Cakes

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.

Prepare and mix

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cream together the butter, sugar, and eggs, adding the eggs one at a time.

  3. Continue creaming for five minutes after adding all the eggs.

  4. Add the lemon extract, then sift in the flour, baking powder, and ground rice.

  5. Mix well, then add the milk and combine thoroughly.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into lined loaf tins, placing a slice of citron peel on top.

  2. Bake for about 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Rice + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,366 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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
Creaming with sugar traps air, giving the cake a tender, fine-grained crumb.
Eggs
Add structure as they set and help bind the batter together.
All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps hold air in the creamed butter.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise in the oven.
Whole milk
Adds moisture and softness to the batter.

The step that matters

Creaming the butter, sugar, and eggs. Beating the butter and sugar until light traps air that expands in the oven. Adding eggs one at a time keeps the emulsion stable, so the batter does not curdle or lose its volume.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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