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Nice Cheap Fruit Cake

A simple fruit cake made with butter, sugar, sour milk, raisins, flour, baking soda, salt, cassia, cloves, and citron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Nice Cheap 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

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the sour milk and mix well.

  3. Stir in the raisins.

  4. Gradually add the flour, baking soda, salt, cassia, cloves, and citron.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into two loaf pans.

  2. Bake for about 1 hour or until a toothpick comes out clean.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cassia + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together194 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Raisin + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with sugar to trap air and give the cake a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a light, aerated batter when creamed.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with baking soda to help the cake rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets as the cake bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that leavens the cake.

The step that matters

Gradually add the flour, baking soda, salt, cassia, cloves, and citron.. Adding flour in portions helps keep the batter smooth and evenly mixed, while overmixing once flour is in can develop gluten and toughen the crumb.

Swap the cassia

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Cassiathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, milk, raisin, flour, clove. 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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