Skip to main content
Dessert

Poor Man's Fruit Cake

A fruit cake made with fat salt pork, raisins, coffee, spices, figs, currants, and flour, baked in a loaf.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Poor Man's Fruit Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the fat pork very fine.

  2. Pour the hot coffee over the pork.

  3. Let the mixture cool slightly.

  4. Add the sugar to the cooled mixture.

  5. Chop the figs coarsely.

  6. Seed and chop the raisins.

  7. Wash and dry the currants.

  8. Combine the fruit and sift a little flour over it.

Make the batter

  1. Add the spices to the remaining flour.

  2. Stir the spiced flour into the coffee and sugar mixture.

  3. Once well beaten, add the fruit mixture.

  4. Stir to combine.

Bake

  1. Bake in one loaf on buttered paper for one hour.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fat salt pork
Adds fat that keeps the cake moist and rich as it bakes.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dense batter together during baking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the cake moist and tender.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the loaf.
Figs
Contribute moisture and chewy texture to the fruit cake.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool slightly. Adding flour to a mixture that is still very hot can start to set the batter unevenly and affect texture, so the coffee and pork mixture should cool before the sugar goes in.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, raisin, coffee, cinnamon, sugar, clove, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, raisin, coffee, cinnamon, sugar, clove, flour. 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.

You might also like

Coffee Ice CreamCoffee Ice Cream91 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesClove CakeClove Cake53 recipes