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Dessert

A Good Soda Cake

A light cake made with butter, flour, sugar, milk, eggs, currants, nutmeg or lemon rind, and baking soda.

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 ↓

A Good Soda Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Break down the butter into small crumbs with the flour.

  2. Mix in the sifted sugar.

  3. Pour in the boiling milk and add the whisked eggs.

  4. Add grated nutmeg or lemon rind and the currants, then beat the mixture well.

  5. Stir in the carbonate of soda and beat lightly for 3-4 minutes.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a buttered mold and bake for 1 to 1¼ hours, or divide into two molds and bake each for ¾ hour.

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

Butter
Rubbed into the flour, it adds richness and a tender, crumbly texture.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and moisture as the cake sets.
Carbonate of soda
Reacts with the batter to lift it, giving the cake its rise.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as it bakes.
Currants
Add pockets of chewy sweetness and fruit through the crumb.

The step that matters

Stir in the carbonate of soda and beat lightly. Soda starts reacting as soon as it meets the batter, so it should be mixed in briefly and baked promptly. Overbeating knocks out the gas bubbles and can toughen the crumb, leaving a flat, dense cake.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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