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Dessert

Fruit Cake

A sweet cake made with flour, sugar, butter, currants, citron, raisins, almonds, eggs, rose-water, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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

Prepare the batter

  1. Beat the butter until creamy. Add the sugar. Beat until very light.

  2. Mix in the rose-water.

  3. Add the well-beaten eggs and flour.

  4. Stir in the spices, lemon peel, and finely chopped blanched almonds.

Add the fruit and bake

  1. Chop the raisins coarsely. Shred the citron finely.

  2. Add the fruit dredged with a little flour.

  3. Bake for 4 to 6 hours.

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. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  5. Currant + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together494 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and gives the cake a tender, rich crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and lift as the cake sets in the oven.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps create a light texture when beaten with butter.
Raisins
Add moisture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.
Currants
Add moisture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Dredging the fruit with flour. Tossing the fruit in a little flour helps it stay suspended in the batter rather than sinking to the bottom during baking, so the fruit distributes evenly through the cake.

Swap the currant

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

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

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