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Dessert

Plum Cake

A fruit cake made with currants, cherries, almonds, citrus peels, spices, brandy, eggs, sugar, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Plum Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C) and line cake molds with buttered paper.

  2. Wash and dry the currants.

  3. Chop the cherries and the peels into small bits.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the butter until creamy.

  2. Gradually mix in the sugar, flour, and eggs.

  3. Add the brandy, salt, spices, and all the fruits. Mix until smooth.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into the prepared molds.

  2. Bake slowly.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Almond + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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 and give the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and moisture as they set in the oven.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake as the batter sets during baking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps create a tender crumb when creamed with butter.
Currants
Provide chewy texture and concentrated fruit sweetness throughout the cake.
Dried or candied cherries
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness to the batter.

The step that matters

Bake slowly. A low oven temperature lets the dense, fruit-heavy batter cook through evenly without the outside setting or browning before the centre is baked.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (almond, orange, lemon, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, brandy):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, orange, lemon, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, brandy. 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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