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Baking

Fruit Cake

A sweet cake with butter, sugar, flour, eggs, currants, raisins, citron, almonds, nutmegs, cinnamon, and cloves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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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 ↓

Fruit Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

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

  2. Beat the eggs separately and then add them to the butter and sugar mixture.

  3. Gradually mix in the flour.

  4. Fold in the currants, raisins, citron, and almonds.

  5. Grate the nutmegs and add them along with the cinnamon and cloves.

  6. Stir in the additional sugar.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared baking pan and bake.

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. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Almond + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten eggs add structure and help bind the batter as they set in the oven.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, butter traps air and adds richness and tenderness.
Flour
Flour forms the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Currants
Dried fruit adds chewy texture and sweetness throughout the cake.
Sugar
Sugar sweetens the cake and helps create a tender crumb when creamed with butter.

The step that matters

Creaming the butter and sugar. Beating butter and sugar until light and fluffy traps air bubbles that help the cake rise and stay tender. Under-creaming leaves a dense result.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, egg, raisin, almond, nutmeg. 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 →

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