Name: Bella's Fruit Cake
Ingredients: 1 pound currants, well washed and dried; 2 pounds raisins, stoned and cut in shreds; ½ pound citron, cut in shreds; 12 eggs; 1 pound sugar; 1 pound flour; 1 pound butter

Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Bella's Fruit Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the day before you want to serve the cake.
Beat the eggs separately.
Stir the sugar into the egg yolks.
Cream the flour and butter together.
Mix the creamed mixture with the eggs and sugar.
Flour the fruit well and slowly stir it into the batter.
Layer the raisins, then currants, and citron until all are combined.

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.

Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,075 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6,180 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,481 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Swap the currant

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

Vanillafits better
Figfits better
Lemonfits better
Currantthe original

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

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Bella's Fruit Cake