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Dessert

Fig Cake

A sweet cake made from boiled figs, raisins, sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Fig and raisin work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 737 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Fig Cake

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil figs in a little water for 15-20 minutes.

  2. Chop figs and raisins finely together.

  3. Add sugar and lemon juice to the mixture.

Assemble

  1. Spread the mixture between two thin cakes of your choice.

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. Fig + raisintop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

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

  2. Fig + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

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

  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. Fig + coffeetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together97 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Figs
Cook down into a soft, sweet paste that gives the filling its body.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and a chewy texture to the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and adds moisture as it dissolves.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet fig mixture.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fig, raisin, coffee, sugar. 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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