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Dessert

To Make a Rich Seed Cake

A buttery cake made with flour, butter, sugar, eggs, caraway seeds, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Caraway and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 200 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

To Make a Rich Seed 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.

Prepare

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

  2. Butter two sheets of paper and tie them around a hoop or use double paper around your tin to prevent burning.

Make the batter

  1. In a pan, cream the softened butter with your hand.

  2. Add the pounded sugar and mix well.

  3. Beat the eggs separately, then mix them into the butter and sugar mixture.

  4. Beat the mixture for 30 minutes.

  5. Gradually add the flour, grated nutmeg, and caraway seeds, mixing until combined.

Bake

  1. Bake for 1.5 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.

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. Caraway + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together200 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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 lift and richness through their proteins and air when beaten.
Butter
Creaming with sugar traps air and adds richness and a tender crumb.
All-purpose flour
Forms the cake's structure as its proteins set during baking.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps hold air in the creamed butter.
Caraway seeds
Adds the characteristic aromatic flavour of the cake.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture for 30 minutes. Long beating incorporates air into the butter, sugar and eggs, which provides the lift this cake relies on since it has no chemical raising agent. Under-beating leaves a dense cake.

Swap the caraway

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Carawaythe original
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Capersfits about as well

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