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Fruit Cake Without Butter, Eggs Ok Milk

A fruit cake made with fat salt pork, raisins, currants, citron, molasses, sugar, spices, and baking soda, baked for one hour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,536 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Fruit Cake Without Butter, Eggs Ok Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the pork until it resembles lard.

  2. Pour boiling water over the pork, saving enough to dissolve the baking soda.

  3. Add the sugar, molasses, and all other ingredients except the fruit.

  4. Seed the raisins, slice the citron, and wash and dry the currants.

Mix and bake

  1. Roll the currants in flour before stirring them into the mixture.

  2. Stir the mixture until it is as stiff as an ordinary fruit cake.

  3. Bake for 1 hour.

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. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Allspice + macetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Cinnamon + macetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Currant + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,359 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Fat salt pork
Adds fat that keeps the cake moist and rich in texture.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color and moisture to the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses and acidity to help the cake rise.
Raisins
Add sweetness, chewy texture and moisture to the cake.
Dark brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps browning.

The step that matters

Stir the mixture until it is as stiff as an ordinary fruit cake.. The batter must be thick enough to hold the fruit evenly suspended. Too thin a batter lets the fruit sink and makes the crumb dense or uneven.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, raisin, currant, molasses, sugar, allspice, cinnamon):

  1. Clovefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, raisin, currant, molasses, sugar, allspice, cinnamon. 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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White 89Black 40Christmas 29Eggless 27Molasses 23Apple 17 See all 952 →

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