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Dessert

Extra Good Luncheon Cake

A sweet cake with sultanas, lemon peel, and butter baked in a tin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Extra Good Luncheon Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dry ingredients

  1. Sift the flour. Stir in the baking powder.

  2. Weigh the butter. Squeeze the butter into a cloth. Rub the butter into the flour.

Make the batter

  1. Add the sultana raisins, the sugar and the finely chopped lemon peel. Stir everything together.

  2. Beat the eggs well. Add the milk. Mix thoroughly into the cake batter.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a ½ quart tin until done.

  2. Carefully turn out.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the cake as its starch sets during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, making the cake rise and become light.
Butter
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and carries flavour.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness as they set.
Milk
Adds moisture that hydrates the flour and loosens the batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Rub the butter into the flour. The butter must be evenly rubbed in, not left in lumps, so that fat coats the flour and keeps the crumb tender and evenly textured. Squeezing out excess liquid first keeps the batter from becoming too wet.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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