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Dessert

Philadelphia Sponge Cake

A light sponge cake made with sugar, eggs, lemon zest, flour, and boiling water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Philadelphia Sponge Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare baking pans.

  2. Pour ½ cup boiling water over ¾ pound sugar in a bowl; stir, cover, and let stand.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the yolks of 6 eggs and add the grated rind of ½ lemon.

  2. Froth the egg whites and pour the yolks on top; beat thoroughly.

  3. Add the syrup (sugar and water) and beat for 10 minutes until thick.

  4. Sift in ½ pound flour and mix gently with a knife.

  5. Add the juice of ½ lemon, pour into pans, and bake for 20 to 30 minutes.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
Whipped yolks and whites build the airy foam that gives the cake its structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and, dissolved in hot water, helps the foam stay thick and stable.
Flour
Sets during baking to form the cake's crumb structure once the foam is folded in.
Lemon
Grated rind adds aroma and the juice adds acidity and brightness to the batter.

The step that matters

Beat the egg foam until thick. Beating the yolks, whites and syrup for the full 10 minutes traps air that leaves the cake light. Under-beaten batter bakes dense, and over-mixing after the flour is added knocks out that air, so flour should be folded in gently with a knife.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Figfits about as well

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