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Dessert

Good Plum Cakes

A sweet cake made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Good Plum Cakes

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. Beat the butter to a cream.

  2. Add the powdered sugar and beat until white and smooth.

  3. Separate the eggs, beating the yolks and whites separately.

  4. Beat the egg whites to stiff froth.

  5. Mix the yolks into the butter mixture, then add the beaten whites.

  6. Gently fold in the flour and currants without overmixing.

Rest and bake

  1. Let the mixture stand in a cold place for 2 hours.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for about 1.5 hours.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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
Creaming with sugar traps air and gives the cake a rich, tender crumb.
Eggs
Yolks add richness and emulsify the batter, while whipped whites trap air for lift and structure.
Flour
Its proteins and starch set during baking to give the cake its structure.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves easily into the butter, adding sweetness and helping create a smooth, light batter.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy fruit pockets throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Folding in the flour and currants. Gentle folding keeps the air from the whipped whites. Overmixing develops gluten in the flour, which makes the cake dense and tough.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, 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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