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Dessert

Fruit Cake

A dense cake made with butter, brown sugar, molasses, sour cream, flour, eggs, raisins, currants, citron, nutmeg, spices, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 the batter

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

  2. In a large bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar, and molasses. Add the sour cream and mix well.

  3. In a separate bowl, combine the flour and baking soda. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, stirring until combined.

  4. Incorporate the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  5. Fold in the raisins, currants, citron, grated nutmeg, and spices. Stir in the brandy until evenly distributed.

Bake

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the cake sets in the oven.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour cream and molasses to help the cake rise.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the dense batter together while baking.
Molasses
Adds moisture, deep sweetness, and color to the cake.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated fruit sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs one at a time. Beating each egg in fully before the next keeps the batter emulsified. Adding them all at once can cause curdling and a coarser, uneven crumb.

Swap the currant

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

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

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