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Dessert

Fruit Cake

A sweet baked cake with raisins, currants, citron, spices, and sour cream.

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

Fruit Cake

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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, cream together the sugar and butter.

  3. Add the eggs and sour cream, mixing well.

  4. Dissolve the baking soda in a small amount of water and add it to the mixture.

Prepare the fruit

  1. In a separate pot, cook the raisins, currants, and citron in a little water until softened.

  2. Before they cool completely, dredge the fruits with flour to prevent sinking.

Make the batter and bake

  1. Gradually stir in the flour until the dough is stiff enough for a spoon to stand in it.

  2. Fold in the floured fruits, cinnamon, cloves, and grated nutmeg.

  3. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan and bake for about 1 hour or until a toothpick comes out clean.

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

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender, rich texture.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the cake sets in the oven.
Flour
Forms the cake's structure once stirred in, stiffening the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour cream to produce gas that helps the cake rise.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and acidity, tenderising the crumb and activating the baking soda.
Raisins
Provide chewy pockets of fruit sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Dredge the fruits with flour before they cool. Flour coats the moist, sticky fruit so it grips the batter and is less likely to sink to the bottom of the cake during baking.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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

More fruit cake recipes

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

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