Skip to main content
Dessert

Plain Fruit Cake

A moist cake made with butter, sugar, egg yolks, sour cream, flour, cinnamon, vanilla, walnuts, raisins, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Plain Fruit 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. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks, cinnamon, and vanilla.

  3. Mix in the sour cream, flour, and lukewarm water with the baking soda dissolved.

  4. Fold in the walnuts and raisins.

  5. Optionally, add a few finely chopped figs.

Bake and finish

  1. Pour the batter into a loaf pan and bake for about 45 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

  2. Use any icing if desired.

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. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Cinnamon + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and add richness and tender texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a tender crumb when creamed with butter.
Egg yolks
Add richness, emulsify the batter, and help bind the crumb.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and acidity, which keeps the crumb tender and reacts with the baking soda.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour cream's acidity to produce gas that helps the cake rise.

The step that matters

Dissolve the baking soda before mixing it in. Baking soda must be fully dissolved in the liquid so it reacts evenly with the sour cream's acid. Undissolved pockets can leave bitter spots and uneven rising.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, cream, flour, cinnamon, raisin. 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.

More fruit cake recipes

White 89Black 40Christmas 29Eggless 27Molasses 23Apple 17 See all 952 →

You might also like

Vanilla Ice CreamVanilla Ice Cream108 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipes