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Dessert

Imperial Cake

A rich cake made with butter, sugar, flour, eggs, raisins, almonds, citron, nutmeg, grape juice, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Imperial Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Beat the eggs separately and then add them to the mixture.

  3. Sift the flour three times and fold it into the batter, reserving a little to sprinkle on the fruit.

  4. Toss the raisins and almonds in the reserved flour before adding them to the mixture.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared baking pan and bake until well 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Almond + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creaming with sugar traps air, giving the cake a light, tender crumb and rich flavour.
Eggs
Add structure and richness as they set, and help hold the batter's air and moisture together.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure as its proteins set during baking.
Sugar
Creams with butter to hold air and adds sweetness and browning.
Raisins
Add moisture, chew and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.
Sweet almonds
Add crunch, nutty flavour and fat to the cake's texture.

The step that matters

Coating the fruit in reserved flour. Dusting the raisins and almonds with flour helps suspend them evenly in the batter instead of letting them sink to the bottom during baking.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, egg, raisin, almond, 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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