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Dessert

English Fruit Cake

A yeasted fruit cake made with flour, salt, currants, raisins, sugar, shortening, citron, lemon extract, and compressed yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

English Fruit Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Make a sponge with the yeast and flour.

  2. Add salt and let the sponge rise.

  3. Knead the dough like bread.

Add fruit and bake

  1. When it rises again, mix in currants, raisins, sugar, shortening, citron, and lemon extract.

  2. Place the mixture in a baking pan.

  3. Let it rise again, then bake.

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

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

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the structure of the dough and sponge.
Compressed yeast
Produces gas that makes the dough rise before baking.
Shortening
Adds fat that tenderises the crumb and carries flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps browning during baking.
Currants
Provide the main fruit body and moisture in the cake.

The step that matters

Letting the dough rise again before baking. Yeast needs time to produce gas and expand the dough. Rising too briefly leaves a dense cake, while over-proofing can collapse the structure, so the dough should be allowed to rise until visibly puffed before it goes into the oven.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, raisin, sugar, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, raisin, sugar, lemon. 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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