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Dessert

Fruit Cake

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter in a large bowl.

  2. Mix in the sugar and spices thoroughly.

  3. Separate the eggs; beat the yolks lightly and add them with part of the flour to the butter and sugar mixture.

  4. Add the remaining flour and the beaten egg whites until well combined.

  5. Stir in the rose-water, currants, raisins, citron, and floured almonds.

  6. Mix everything together lightly and pour into a pan lined with buttered paper.

Bake

  1. Bake for 4.5 hours at 300°F (150°C).

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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the heavy batter together as it bakes.
Butter
Creams with the sugar to trap air and gives the cake richness and tender texture.
Eggs
Bind the batter and, once beaten, add lift and structure to the crumb.
White sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown while creaming with the butter adds air.
Currants
Add chewy fruit pieces and moisture to the finished cake.
Raisins
Add chewy fruit pieces and sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Bake low and slow for the full time. A dense fruit cake this heavy needs gentle, prolonged heat so the centre sets before the outside over-browns. Pulling it early can leave the middle wet and gummy.

Swap the currant

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

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

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