Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Cake

A baked cake made with raisins, cherries, citron, dates, butter, plum jelly, flour, baking powder, eggs, and sugar.

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

Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Fruit Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  3. Stir in the plum jelly and maraschino cherries with their juice.

  4. In a separate bowl, combine the flour and baking powder.

  5. Gradually add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients, mixing until just combined.

  6. Fold in the raisins, citron, dates, and additional cherries.

  7. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and smooth the top.

Bake

  1. Bake for about 1 hour or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + datestop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together358 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  5. Dates + plumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness when creamed with sugar, trapping air for lightness.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps trap air when creamed with butter.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and turns lighter.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Gradually add the flour mixture. Mixing only until just combined keeps gluten development low, so the cake stays tender rather than tough.

Swap the plum

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

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

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

Stuffed DatesStuffed Dates32 recipesMixed Fruit SherbetMixed Fruit Sherbet6 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes