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Dessert

Fruit Cake

A dense cake made with butter, brown sugar, flour, molasses, eggs, raisins, citron, almonds, currants, figs, spices, brandy, sherry, and browned flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 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.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Stone the raisins and wash and dry the currants thoroughly.

  2. Shred the citron and cut the figs into small pieces.

  3. In a wooden bowl, combine all the fruits and chop finely.

  4. Chop and add the almonds, then sprinkle with the extra browned flour and rub it in thoroughly.

Make and bake the cake

  1. Mix the cake batter in the usual way, adding the fruit last.

  2. Line pans with thick buttered paper and bake slowly at 350°F (175°C).

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 + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the fruit within the cake.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cake brown.
Dark molasses
Adds moisture, depth of flavor and a darker color.
Raisins
Provide chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Bake slowly and add the fruit last. Slow baking at a moderate heat lets the dense batter set through without the outside burning before the center is cooked. Folding the fruit in last keeps it evenly distributed rather than sinking or breaking up the batter.

Swap the currant

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

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

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