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Dessert

Lady Baltimore Cake

A layered cake with butter, sugar, milk, flour, egg whites, baking powder, and a sweet filling and icing of raisins, pecans, and figs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Lady Baltimore 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.

Make the cake

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

  2. Add the sweet milk and mix well.

  3. Gradually add the flour, baking powder, and beaten egg whites, mixing until smooth.

  4. Divide the batter into three layers and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

Make the filling and assemble

  1. For the filling, dissolve the granulated sugar in water and cook until it threads.

  2. Pour the syrup over the beaten egg whites, stirring constantly until combined.

  3. For the icing, mix in the chopped raisins, pecans, and figs.

  4. Layer the cakes with the dark layer in the center and frost with the icing.

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

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

  3. Raisin + figtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Milk + figtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,026 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Raisin + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and tenderness to the crumb and richness to the batter.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure that holds the layers together.
Egg whites
Add lift and structure to the batter and set the filling when beaten.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the layers rise.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it hold a thread-like syrup texture.
Raisins
Add chewy sweetness and moisture to the icing.

The step that matters

Cooking the sugar syrup to the threading stage. Sugar syrup must reach the correct concentration before it meets the egg whites. Undercooked syrup stays runny and will not set, while overcooked syrup turns grainy or hard, so the filling can fail either way.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

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