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Dessert

Fruit Cake

A baked cake made with sugar, currants, raisins, citron, butter, eggs, flour, baking powder, and grape juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

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.

Prepare

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

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the butter and sugar.

  2. Add the egg yolks and grape juice, mixing well.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites until combined.

  4. Sift in the flour mixed with baking powder and stir until smooth.

  5. Gently fold in the currants, raisins, and citron.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared baking pan and bake for 2 hours.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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, beaten and folded in, lighten its structure.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and adds richness and a tender crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake as it bakes.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the cake rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps trap air for lightness.
Raisins
Add moisture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Egg whites hold the air that lightens the batter. Folding gently keeps that air in, so the cake rises and stays light instead of deflating.

Swap the grape

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

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

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

More fruit cake recipes

White 89Black 40Christmas 29Eggless 27Molasses 23Apple 17 See all 952 →

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