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Dessert

White Fruit Cake

A moist cake made with butter, sugar, sweet milk, flour, egg whites, baking powder, raisins, figs, almonds, citron, lemon extract, and optional coconut.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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White Fruit Cake

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 ↓

White Fruit Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

  3. Add sweet milk and mix well.

  4. Combine flour and baking powder.

  5. Add flour mixture to butter mixture.

  6. Incorporate egg whites and mix until smooth.

Add the fruit and bake

  1. Dust chopped fruit with a little flour.

  2. Fold fruit into batter with lemon extract.

  3. Pour batter into greased cake pan.

  4. Bake for 2 hours.

  5. Check for doneness with a skewer.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Fig + almondtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together519 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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 tender, rich crumb.
Egg whites
Add structure and lift to the batter as they set during baking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and becomes light.
Flour
Forms the main structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
Figs
Add moisture and chewy sweetness throughout the cake.
Seeded raisins
Add moisture and concentrated sweetness to the crumb.

The step that matters

Check for doneness with a skewer. A long bake with a dense fruit load can leave the centre wet or the outside overbaked. A skewer inserted into the centre should come out clean, showing the batter has set through.

Swap the fig

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figthe original
  3. Coconutfits less well
  4. Peachfits less well

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