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Dessert

Plum Cake

A fruit cake made with butter, sugar, flour, eggs, raisins, currants, candied citron, almonds, chocolate, and spices, steamed and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Plum Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the batter

  1. Mix the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks and spices.

  3. Melt the chocolate and stir it in.

  4. Add the flour and chopped almonds.

  5. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites and floured fruit.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered pan or a pan lined with buttered paper.

  2. Cover the pan and steam the cake for 3 hours.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for 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. 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. Almond + chocolatetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,733 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg whites lift the batter and give the cake its airy structure, while yolks enrich it.
Butter
Fat that gives the cake richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps cream the butter for a light batter.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the dense fruit and nuts together.
Raisins
Add moisture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.
Almonds
Add richness, texture and a nutty flavor.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites and floured fruit. Folding gently keeps the air beaten into the egg whites. Overmixing deflates the batter, which makes the cake dense instead of light.

Swap the currant

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

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

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