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Dessert

White Fruit Cake

A light fruit cake made with sugar, egg whites, flour, butter, and candied fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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White Fruit Cake

Why it works: Coconut and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,294 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

White Fruit Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Sift flour once, measure, add baking powder, sift again, and add to creamed butter and sugar, beating hard.

  2. Next, add nuts, fruits, and flavoring.

  3. Add water to egg whites, beat stiff, and fold into the mixture.

Bake

  1. Bake slowly.

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. Coconut + vanillatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,294 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Orange + vanillatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Orange + coconuttop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together584 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Butter + coconuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Egg whites
Beaten stiff and folded in, they trap air that lightens the crumb and helps it rise.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and a tender texture.
Sugar
Creamed with butter, it sweetens the cake and helps give it a tender crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, causing the cake to rise in the oven.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Beaten egg whites hold air that makes the cake light. Folding gently, rather than stirring, keeps that air from deflating and the batter from toughening.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, flour, butter, coconut, vanilla):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Bananafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, flour, butter, coconut, vanilla. 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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