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Dessert

A Dutch Cake

A cake made with egg whites, flour, milk, butter, sugar, and yeast, baked until done.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

A Dutch Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg whites until frothy.

  2. Mix the egg yolks one by one with the flour.

  3. Add enough lukewarm milk to achieve a paste-like consistency.

  4. Stir in the melted butter, sugar, and a little yeast.

  5. Work the mixture for 30 minutes.

  6. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a buttered mold.

  2. Let it rise slightly in a warm place.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until done.

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. Milk + buttertop 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. Egg + flourtop 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

Egg whites
Beaten whites trap air, giving the cake lift and a light structure.
All-purpose flour
Flour provides the gluten network that gives the cake its body.
Butter
Melted butter adds fat, which tenderises the crumb and adds richness.
Yeast
Yeast produces gas as it ferments, helping the batter rise.
Milk
Milk adds moisture and hydrates the flour into a paste-like batter.
Sugar
Sugar adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air bubbles in the whites intact. Stirring vigorously would deflate them, leaving a denser cake that rises less.

“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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