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Dessert

Economical Sultana Cake

A simple sultana cake made with flour, sultanas, butter, sugar, milk, egg, baking powder, and candied peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Economical Sultana 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 the dry ingredients

  1. Mix the flour and baking powder, then sift into a bowl.

  2. Rub in the butter and add the sugar.

  3. Rinse the sultanas in a sieve.

  4. Sprinkle the sultanas with a little flour and rub gently to remove dirt and stalks.

  5. Pick over the sultanas and add them to the dry ingredients along with the candied peel.

Make the dough

  1. Beat the egg.

  2. Mix in nearly all the milk.

  3. Combine everything into a stiff dough, adding more milk if needed.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake in a well-greased cake tin lined with buttered paper at 350°F (175°C) for about one hour.

  2. Once done, remove from the tin and take off the paper.

  3. Cool on a sieve.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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 once mixed with liquid and baked.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes lighter.
Egg
Binds the dough and adds richness and structure to the crumb.
Butter or dripping
Rubbed into the flour to add fat, tenderness and flavour.
Milk
Adds moisture so the flour hydrates and the dough comes together.
Sultanas
Add chewy pockets of sweetness and fruit flavour throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Adding milk to the dough. Flour absorbs liquid at different rates, so the dough can end up too stiff or too wet. Adding milk gradually and checking the texture keeps the crumb tender rather than dry or heavy.

“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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