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Dessert

Fruit Cake

A dense cake made with flour, sugar, butter, raisins, currants, citron, almonds, mace, rose-water, lemon juice, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fruit Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Add the beaten egg whites and yolks separately.

  3. Stir in the rose-water, lemon juice, and mace.

  4. Gradually add the flour, mixing well.

Add fruit and bake

  1. Fold in the fruit just before pouring into the pans.

  2. Bake for 2 hours if using one loaf.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Currant + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together494 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Add structure and richness as they set during baking, and lift the batter.
Flour
Forms the gluten-based framework that holds the cake's shape once baked.
Butter
Adds fat and tenderness, and carries flavor through the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, traps air that helps it rise.
Raisins
Add moisture and chewy sweetness to the finished crumb.
Currants
Add moisture and tart, concentrated fruit flavor throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Fold in the fruit just before pouring into the pans. Adding fruit late keeps the batter from being overworked, so the cake stays tender. Heavy fruit also sinks if the batter is loose, so folding gently distributes it evenly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, butter, raisin, currant, almond, rose):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, raisin, currant, almond, rose. 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.

More fruit cake recipes

White 89Black 40Christmas 29Eggless 27Molasses 23Apple 17 See all 952 →

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