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Dessert

White Fruit Cake

A layered cake made with butter, flour, powdered sugar, egg whites, figs, raisins, citron, almonds, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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White Fruit Cake

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 ↓

White Fruit Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cake

  1. Cream the butter and powdered sugar together until smooth.

  2. Sift the flour and baking powder together.

  3. Add the flour mixture alternately with the beaten egg whites to the creamed mixture.

  4. Bake in jelly cake tins.

Fill and ice

  1. For the filling, mix the chopped figs, raisins, citron, and almonds with the beaten egg whites, powdered sugar, and lemon juice.

  2. Spread the filling between the layers of the cake.

  3. For icing, beat the egg white with lemon juice and powdered sugar, then ice the entire cake.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Fig + almondtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together519 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Fig + raisintop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the sugar to give the cake a fine, tender crumb.
Egg whites
Add structure and lift to the batter and bind the filling.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter so the cake rises and stays light.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
Figs, raisins, citron, and almonds
Add chewy texture and fruity sweetness to the filling.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, egg, fig, raisin, 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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