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Dessert

Genoese Pastry

A light, buttered cake made with flour, butter, caster sugar, and eggs, baked in a round tin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Genoese Pastry

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over low heat, being careful not to burn it.

  2. Prepare a round cake tin (2 inches deep) by lining it with parchment paper, allowing 1 inch to extend above the edge. Butter the parchment paper with a brush dipped in the melted butter.

  3. Sift the flour through a wire sieve into a bowl.

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, break the eggs and add the caster sugar.

  2. Place the bowl over a saucepan of boiling water and whip the eggs and sugar for 20 minutes, ensuring they do not get too hot.

  3. Remove the bowl from the heat and add the melted butter, then gently fold in the sifted flour with a wooden spoon.

  4. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin.

Bake and cool

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes, or until pale brown and a finger pressed lightly leaves no mark.

  2. Once baked, turn the cake out onto a wire rack to cool.

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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
Whipped with sugar to trap air, giving the cake its light, airy structure.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch that sets during baking to give the cake its structure.
Unsalted butter
Adds richness and moisture, and softens the crumb as it is folded in.
Caster sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps stabilise the whipped egg foam.

The step that matters

Whipping the eggs and sugar. The eggs must be whipped until thick and pale, trapping air that leavens the sponge. Keeping them warm but not hot prevents the eggs from cooking, and gentle folding keeps that trapped air from collapsing.

“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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