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Dessert

Plum Cake, Excellent

A yeasted cake made with flour, butter, currants, raisins, sugar, candied peel, nutmeg, eggs, almond essence, and milk.

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 ↓

Plum Cake, Excellent

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.

Prepare the dough

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

  2. Mix baking powder and salt with flour.

  3. Rub in butter, lard, or dripping until well combined.

  4. Add currants, raisins, sugar, candied peel, and grated nutmeg; mix thoroughly.

  5. Whisk eggs for 5-6 minutes, then mix in almond essence and a little warm milk.

  6. Stir egg mixture into the flour mixture, adding enough milk to form a light dough.

Bake

  1. Transfer the dough to a large buttered tin or two small tins.

  2. Bake immediately for 1-2 hours, depending on tin size.

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. Nutmeg + almondtop 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

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas as it reacts in the heat, lifting the dough so the cake rises.
Butter, lard, or dripping
Coats the flour and adds richness and a tender, crumbly texture.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add moisture and structure to the crumb.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cake brown as it bakes.
Currants
Add fruit flavour and chewy pockets throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Bake immediately after mixing. Baking powder starts releasing gas as soon as it gets wet, so delaying the bake lets it lose lift and can leave the cake dense.

Swap the currant

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

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

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