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Dessert

Seed-cakes

A buttery cake made with sugar, eggs, nutmeg, flour, and caraway seeds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and caraway match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 200 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Seed-cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the butter into a cream, gradually adding the sugar.

  2. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff, then mix in the yolks.

  3. Combine the egg mixture with the butter and sugar, beating for 10 minutes.

  4. Gradually mix in the nutmeg and flour.

Bake

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Beat in the caraway seeds just before baking.

  3. Pour the mixture into a baking pan and bake for about 1 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. Nutmeg + carawaytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together200 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Flour + carawaytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,435 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 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
Creams with the sugar to create a rich, tender crumb structure.
Egg yolks
Add richness and emulsify the batter for a tender, fine texture.
Egg whites
Beaten until stiff, they trap air that lifts the cake as it bakes.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake as the eggs and butter bake.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps the butter hold air when creamed.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until stiff. Stiff whites trap air that leavens the batter. Underbeaten whites collapse, and overbeaten whites turn grainy and dry, so the cake rises poorly.

Swap the caraway

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Carawaythe original
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Capersfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, nutmeg, 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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