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Dessert

Lunch Cake

A sweet cake made with flour, butter, sugar, raisins, currants, citrus peel, spices, milk, eggs, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Lunch Cake

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lunch Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, rub the butter into the flour until it resembles crumbs.

  2. Add the sugar, raisins, currants, and spices, and mix well.

  3. In a separate bowl, whisk the milk and eggs together.

  4. Combine the wet ingredients with the dry mixture and stir until combined.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan.

  2. Bake in the preheated oven for 2 to 2½ hours.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour, it adds richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help give the cake its structure and moisture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cake brown as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidity in the batter to help it rise.

The step that matters

Bake low and long. A long, moderate bake lets the dense batter cook through to the center without the outside burning. Pulling it too early can leave the middle raw and gummy.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Cranberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, raisin, egg, lemon, orange. 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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White 89Black 40Christmas 29Eggless 27Molasses 23Apple 17 See all 952 →

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