Skip to main content
Dessert

My Mother's English Fruit Cake

A dense cake made with butter, sugar, flour, eggs, raisins, currants, candied citrus, spices, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

My Mother's English Fruit Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a large bowl.

  2. Add the sugar and beat thoroughly.

  3. Incorporate the yolks of the eggs one at a time.

  4. Add a little flour, then part of the beaten egg whites.

  5. Continue adding the remaining egg whites and flour until fully combined.

Add the fruit and bake

  1. Mix the raisins, currants, candied citron, candied lemon peel, allspice, cloves, and grated nutmeg together.

  2. Add the brandy last and mix well.

  3. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake.

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. Currant + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + brandytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,768 recipes

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

Butter and flour 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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks enrich the batter and whites add lift and structure as the cake sets.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and gives the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and, creamed with butter, helps create a light texture.
Raisins
Add moisture, chewiness and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Incorporate the yolks one at a time. Adding eggs gradually lets each one emulsify fully into the creamed butter and sugar. Adding them too fast can cause the batter to separate or curdle, which hurts the texture.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, flour, egg, raisin, currant, brandy. 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

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesBrandy PeachesBrandy Peaches68 recipes