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Dessert

Warsaw White Cake

A light, buttery cake made with flour, butter, milk, sugar, baking soda, and cream of tartar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Warsaw White 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 batter

  1. In a bowl, mix ¾ cup of flour with melted butter, cream of tartar, and half of the milk.

  2. In another bowl, mix the remaining ¾ cup of flour with baking soda and the other half of the milk.

  3. Combine both mixtures and add sugar.

  4. Beat all ingredients together until smooth.

Bake

  1. Pour into a baking pan and bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden.

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

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake's crumb together as it sets.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the batter to release gas, which makes the cake rise.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that reacts with the baking soda and helps give a lighter, stable crumb.
Melted butter
Adds fat that tenderizes the crumb and gives a richer flavor.
Milk
Supplies the liquid that hydrates the flour and dissolves the other ingredients into a batter.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown during baking.

The step that matters

Bake soon after mixing. Baking soda and cream of tartar start releasing gas as soon as they get wet. If the batter sits too long before it goes into the oven, some of that lift is lost, so the cake may bake up flatter and denser.

“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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