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Light Fruit Cake

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and fig match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 373 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Light 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.

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

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  3. Add the milk and mix well.

  4. Fold in the Sultana raisins, black walnuts, citron, peanuts, and figs.

  5. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  6. Gently fold the egg whites into the batter.

  7. Sift the baking powder with the flour and fold it into the mixture.

  8. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake for about 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. Walnut + figtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together373 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Walnut + peanuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together241 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Raisin + figtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

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

  5. Milk + figtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,026 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

Swap the peanut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, milk, raisin, walnut, fig, egg):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Pecansfits better
  4. Peanutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, milk, raisin, walnut, fig, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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