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Baking

Silver Cake

A cake made with egg whites, sugar, butter, sweet milk, flour, cream of tartar, baking soda, and lemon extract, baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Silver 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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, mix the beaten egg whites, sugar, butter, and sweet milk until well combined.

  2. Sift together the flour, cream of tartar, and baking soda, then gradually add to the wet mixture.

  3. Stir in the lemon extract.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake until a crust forms on top.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Egg whites
Whipped foam that gives the cake its light, airy structure.
Flour
Forms the gluten and starch framework that sets the cake's crumb.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer mouthfeel.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps keep it moist and tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidity in the batter to produce gas for rising.
Cream of tartar
Acid that stabilises the whipped egg whites and helps the cake rise.

The step that matters

Gradually adding the sifted dry ingredients. Adding flour in portions and mixing gently keeps the batter smooth and limits gluten development, which would otherwise make the cake tough. Overmixing also knocks air out of the egg whites, reducing lift.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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