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Dessert

Fruit Cake Without Butter, Eggs or Milk

A fruit cake made with pork fat, raisins, currants, citron, molasses, sugar, spices, and baking soda, baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 or Milk

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Chop the pork until it resembles lard.

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

  3. Add the sugar, molasses, and spices to the pork mixture.

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

  5. Dust the fruit with flour before stirring it into the batter.

  6. Mix until the batter is as stiff as an ordinary fruit cake.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for one 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
Supplies fat in place of butter, giving the cake richness and a tender crumb.
Molasses
Adds moisture, dark color and a deep sweet flavor.
Raisins
Provide moisture and chewy sweetness throughout the cake.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses to help the cake rise and lighten.
Dark brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cake brown.

The step that matters

Dissolving the baking soda. Baking soda needs to be fully dissolved in the hot water before mixing, so it spreads evenly through the batter. Clumps can leave bitter pockets and uneven rising, and the soda reacts with the acidic molasses to lift the cake.

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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