Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Cakes

Fruit cakes made with puff pastry, currants, apple, peel, sugar, spice, and margarine, baked at 400°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Currant and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,918 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Fruit Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Wash the currants.

  2. Chop the apple finely.

  3. Mix all ingredients together.

Assemble

  1. Roll out half of the pastry into a square.

  2. Place the mixture on the pastry.

  3. Lay the other half of the pastry on top.

  4. Mark the pastry and brush with egg.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C).

  2. Cut into squares and dust with icing sugar.

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. Currant + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Rough puff pastry
Forms the flaky, layered casing that puffs and browns in the oven.
Currants
Provide chewy texture and concentrated fruit sweetness inside the cakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps the fruit mixture brown slightly in the oven.
Apple
Adds moisture and tartness that balances the sweetness of the currants and sugar.
Margarine
Adds fat that enriches the filling and adds richness to the mixture.

The step that matters

Assemble and seal the pastry. Rough puff pastry relies on cold, distinct layers to rise. If the edges are not sealed well, the filling can leak during baking and the layers may not puff evenly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, apple):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, apple. 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.

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipes