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Dessert

Bride Cake

A currant cake made with flour, spices, butter, eggs, yeast, and rose water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Bride Cake

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Bride Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the eggs well and strain them with the yeast and a little warm water into the flour.

  2. Add the cold butter, broken into small bits, and knead with scalding hot water until well combined.

  3. Cover the dough with a warm cloth and let it rise near the fire for about 15 minutes.

Prepare the currants

  1. Prepare the currants by ensuring they are very dry and mix with musk and amber grease dissolved in rose water.

  2. Strew finely powdered loaf sugar among the currants to restore sweetness.

Assemble the cake

  1. Break the dough into small pieces and layer it with the currants, alternating until well mixed without breaking the currants.

  2. Take a piece of risen dough to cover the top and bottom of the cake, rolling it thin and wetting it with rose water.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the dough structure that holds the cake together and gives it body.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, binding the dough and helping it set.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich, moist crumb.
Yeast
Produces gas as the dough rises, lightening the texture.
Currants
Provide fruit, chew and sweetness throughout the layers.

The step that matters

Let the dough rise before layering. Yeast needs time and warmth to produce gas. Under-proofed dough stays dense and will not lighten the finished cake.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, mace, nutmeg, cinnamon, butter, egg, rose. 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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