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Dessert

Fruit Cake

A dense, fruit-filled cake baked at 300°F with butter, sugar, sour cream, flour, eggs, spices, dried fruit, nuts, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Fruit Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

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

  3. Add the sour cream and eggs, mixing well.

  4. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda, cloves, and cinnamon.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until just combined.

  6. Fold in the raisins, currants, almonds, figs, citron, nutmeg, and lemon.

  7. Stir in the brandy until evenly distributed.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan.

  2. Bake for 4 hours 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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the cake sets in the oven.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake crumb as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness through fat coating the flour.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps it brown during the long bake.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour cream to lift and lighten the batter.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and acidity that tenderizes the crumb and activates the baking soda.

The step that matters

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until just combined.. Overmixing once flour meets liquid develops gluten, which toughens the cake. Stopping as soon as the flour disappears keeps the crumb tender.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

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

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