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Baking

Queen-cake

A small butter cake with currants, flour, sugar and eggs, baked in individual tins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and rose work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 494 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Queen-cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Mix the dried flour, sifted sugar, and washed currants in a bowl.

  2. Wash the butter in rose-water and beat it well.

  3. Add the beaten eggs (yolks and whites separately) to the butter.

Make the batter

  1. Gradually mix in the dry ingredients and beat the mixture for one hour.

Bake

  1. Butter small tins, teacups, or saucers and fill them half full with the batter.

  2. Sprinkle a little fine sugar over the batter before placing them in the oven.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

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. Currant + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together494 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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
Bind the batter and add structure and lift as the cake sets in the oven.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the cake a tender crumb and flavour.
Dried flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set during baking.
Sifted sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps brown the crust as it bakes.
Washed currants
Add fruitiness and chewy pockets of sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Beating the batter for one hour. Long beating incorporates air into the creamed butter and eggs, which gives lift. Overbeating after the flour is added can develop gluten and make the cake tough, so the mixture should be beaten with care once dry ingredients go in.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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