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Dessert

Savoy Cake

Savoy Cake is a light, lemon-flavored cake made with eggs, sugar, flour, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Savoy Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Break the eggs into a round-bottomed biscuit pan with the sugar.

  2. Set the pan in warm water.

  3. Whisk briskly for 30 minutes until thick and warm.

  4. Remove the pan from the water.

  5. Whisk the batter until cold.

  6. Gently stir in the flour.

  7. Flavor the batter with lemon essence or lemon rind.

Prepare the mold

  1. Melt butter.

  2. Skim off the scum.

  3. Brush the melted butter into the mold.

  4. Dust the mold with a mixture of equal parts sugar and flour.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into the prepared mold.

  2. Bake.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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

Eggs
Whisked with sugar to trap air, giving the cake its light, airy structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps stabilize the whisked egg foam.
Flour
Sets during baking to form the cake's crumb and structure.
Butter
Greases the mold so the cake releases cleanly and browns lightly at the edges.

The step that matters

Whisk the batter until cold. The eggs and sugar must be whisked warm over water until thick, then cooled. Cooling before adding flour keeps the trapped air from collapsing, so the cake rises well.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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