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Dessert

Sweet Egg Cake

A sweet cake made from milk, sugar, eggs, butter, and lemon peel, cooked in a pan until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sweet Egg Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. Put the milk in a saucepan and heat until quite hot.

  2. Add sugar to taste and a little grated nutmeg.

  3. Grate the lemon peel and add it to the mixture.

  4. Beat the eggs and add them to the saucepan along with the egg yolks.

  5. Beat all the ingredients well together.

Cook and serve

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan.

  2. Fry the mixture in the pan until golden brown on both sides.

  3. Serve hot.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Nutmeg + buttertop 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

Eggs
Set the mixture into a firm, sliceable cake as they cook and coagulate.
Milk
Provides the liquid base and moisture that keeps the cake tender.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and helps the surface brown in the pan.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to golden browning during frying.
Lemon peel
Adds bright citrus aroma from the oils in the zest.

The step that matters

Fry until golden brown on both sides. The eggs must set fully through the middle while the surface browns. Browning comes from sugars and milk proteins reacting with heat. Too much heat scorches the outside before the inside sets, and too little leaves the cake pale and soft.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Tarragonfits less well

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