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Dessert

Common Fruit Cake

A moist cake made with butter, sugar, eggs, milk, flour, spices, currants, and raisins, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Common 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.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks and sweet milk, mixing well.

  3. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, mace, nutmeg, and baking powder.

  4. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the mixture.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture, beating well.

  6. Roll the currants and raisins in a little flour, then fold them into the batter.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased loaf pan.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for a little more than an 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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the sugar to trap air, giving a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the batter; whipped whites add lift and structure.
All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as its proteins set in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking so the cake rises and becomes light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a fine, tender crumb when creamed with butter.
Currants and raisins
Add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness; flouring them helps keep them from sinking.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Stiff whites hold air that lifts the batter. Folding gently preserves that air; vigorous stirring deflates it and leads to a denser cake.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits about as well
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Gingerfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, milk, flour, cinnamon, allspice. 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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