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Dessert

Very Best Fruit Cake

A moist cake made with candied fruits, nuts, and spices, baked slowly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 20 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 ↓

Very Best Fruit Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Shred the lemon and orange peels, halve the cherries, chop the walnuts, pecans, and dates, and cut the pineapple and citron into almond-sized pieces.

  2. Dredge the fruits in ½ cup of flour.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the shortening and sugar together.

  2. Add the honey, then the beaten eggs, and mix well.

  3. Gradually add the flour sifted with the dry ingredients, alternating with the fruit juice, and beat thoroughly.

  4. Pour the batter over the floured fruits and mix well.

Bake and store

  1. Pour the batter into greased and paper-lined cake tins or baking dishes.

  2. For gift packaging, use pint or quart aluminum-foil freezer containers.

  3. Bake in a slow oven at 300 °F (150 °C) for 2 to 3 hours for pints and 1½ hours for quarts.

  4. Place a pan with 2 cups of water on the bottom shelf of the oven while baking to keep the cakes moist and give them a shiny glaze.

  5. Store in a covered container in a cool place.

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. Walnut + pecanstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Pecans + datestop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Walnut + datestop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together302 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during baking.
Shortening
Creamed with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender crumb.
Enriched flour
Forms the structure of the cake as the batter sets in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown while creaming aerates the batter.
Honey
Adds sweetness and moisture, helping the cake stay moist.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to lift the cake as it bakes.

The step that matters

Baking in a slow oven with water in the oven. Long, low-temperature baking cooks the dense fruit batter through without scorching the outside. The water pan adds humidity, which keeps the surface from drying out and helps the cake stay moist.

Swap the pecans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, orange, walnut, dates, pineapple, sugar, honey):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Brazil nutfits better
  4. Pecansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, orange, walnut, dates, pineapple, sugar, honey. 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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