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Dessert

Composition Cake

A sweet cake made with eggs, sugar, flour, butter, milk, baking soda, nutmeg, wine, and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Composition Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add part of the milk and stir in 1 egg with some flour.

  3. Continue adding eggs until all are used.

  4. Mix in the remaining milk and flour.

  5. Dissolve the baking soda in water and add it to the mixture.

Add the fruit and flavouring

  1. Stir in the wine, grated nutmeg, and raisins.

  2. You may also add citron or currants if desired.

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. Nutmeg + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the cake sets.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender crumb through fat in the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the batter to help the cake rise.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Capersfits less well
  4. Jalapenofits less well

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