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Dessert

Fruit Cake

A fruit cake made from raisins, currants, figs, citron, dates, ginger fruit, nuts, coconut, butter, flour, orange and lemon juice, rice flour, and egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Pine and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 176 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Fruit Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit and nuts

  1. Chop the raisins, currants, figs, citron, dates, and ginger fruit well and mix thoroughly.

  2. Add the pine nuts, blanched almonds, and grated coconut to the mixture.

Make the dough

  1. Cream the butter with the whole-wheat flour.

  2. Pour the orange juice and lemon juice over the mixture.

  3. Knead in the rice flour and work it well, adding the beaten egg whites.

Dry and serve

  1. Roll out the dough on chestnut flour, cut into squares, and dry in the sun.

  2. Serve with whipped cream or nut cream.

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. Pine + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together176 recipes

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

  2. Fig + datestop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together318 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

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

  4. Fig + almondtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together519 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Nuts + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together394 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

Egg whites
Bind the dough and add structure as they are worked in.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the dough feel tender.
Whole-wheat flour
Provides the base structure of the dough when creamed with butter.
Rice flour
Adds body to the kneaded dough, helping it hold its shape.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, fig, dates, ginger, pine, nuts, almond):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, fig, dates, ginger, pine, nuts, 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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