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Dessert

Peach Gateau

A sponge cake filled with sliced peaches, sugar, raisins, currants, blackberry jam, and a cream mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and blackberry share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Peach Gateau

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cake

  1. Bake a sponge cake in a round tin.

  2. Cut out a piece from the center, leaving 1 inch thick walls on the sides and ½ inch thick on the bottom.

  3. Mix the sliced peaches with powdered sugar and fill the open space in the cake with this mixture.

Make the filling

  1. Beat the cream until stiff.

  2. Gradually beat in the sugar, then add the chopped raisins, currants, and blackberry jam.

  3. Add the beaten egg yolks and milk alternately with the flour, which has been sifted with cloves, cinnamon, and baking powder.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites and mix thoroughly.

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. Peach + blackberrytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together53 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

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

  3. Peach + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together781 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

  4. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  5. Blackberry + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together315 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Whipped to foam, they lighten the batter and give it an airy, tender texture.
Egg yolks
Add richness and structure, helping bind the batter.
Cream
Whipped to stiffness, it adds richness and a light, creamy texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter together as it sets.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping it rise and turn light.
Blackberry jam
Adds sweetness, fruity flavor, and moisture to the filling.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air whipped into the egg whites. Stirring vigorously knocks out air, leaving a denser, less light result.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peach, sugar, cream, raisin, blackberry, egg, milk):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, sugar, cream, raisin, blackberry, egg, milk. 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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