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Dessert

Bath Cakes

A yeast-leavened cake with butter, sugar, caraway seeds, and cloves, baked in buttered tins.

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

Why it works: Flour and caraway match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,435 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bath Cakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix flour, butter, eggs, salt, and yeast together.

  2. Place the mixture over a fire until it has risen sufficiently.

  3. Add sifted sugar, caraway seeds, and pounded cloves.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out into small cakes.

  2. Bake on well-cleaned tins rubbed with butter.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Caraway + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together143 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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 + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,671 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 main structure of the dough once it is mixed with the liquid eggs.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the dough hold its shape and set when baked.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and flavour in the finished cakes.
Yeast
Produces gas that makes the mixture rise before the cakes are shaped.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to browning during baking.

The step that matters

Letting the mixture rise over the fire. Yeast needs enough warmth to produce gas, but too much heat kills it. The mixture should rise fully before shaping so the cakes come out light rather than dense.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

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