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Dessert

A Small Rich Plum Cake

A rich plum cake made with currants, butter, eggs, sugar, flour, citron, citrus peel, almonds, spices, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

A Small Rich Plum Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash and pick the currants clean, then dry them.

  2. Rub a little flour on the currants.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a copper preserving pan by hand.

  2. Whisk the eggs together for about 10 minutes.

  3. Add the powdered sugar to the eggs.

  4. Whisk over low heat, being careful not to burn.

  5. Remove the mixture from heat.

  6. Whisk until cool.

  7. Mix the egg mixture with the creamed butter by hand.

  8. Add the currants, flour, citron, lemon and orange peel, sweet almonds, and pounded bitter almonds.

  9. Stir in the cinnamon, mace, and brandy.

Bake

  1. Prepare a cake pan with parchment paper.

  2. Pour the batter into the pan.

  3. Bake in a regular heat oven.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whisked and cooked with sugar, they build the structure and set the crumb.
Butter
Creamed to hold air and give the cake richness and a tender texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the fruit and batter together as the cake sets.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps form a smooth, stable base with the eggs.
Currants
Add moisture, sweetness and fruity flavor throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Whisking the eggs and sugar over low heat. Gentle heat thickens the eggs without scrambling them. Too much heat can curdle or burn the mixture, so it must be stirred constantly and kept low.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, sugar, flour, lemon, orange, 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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