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Dessert

Fruit Cake

Fruit cake made with brown sugar, butter, flour, raisins, currants, citron, cloves, mace, sour cream, baking soda, and dark jelly.

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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, cream together the brown sugar and butter.

  2. Add the flour, raisins, currants, citron, cloves, mace, sour cream, baking soda, and dark jelly. Mix well.

  3. Dredge the fruit with a little flour to prevent sinking.

  4. Pour the batter into a greased cake pan.

Bake

  1. Bake for 3 hours or until a toothpick inserted in the center 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the sugar to give the cake richness and a tender crumb.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cake brown and stay soft.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter and fruit together as it bakes.
Sour cream
Adds moisture and acidity, which helps the baking soda react and the crumb stay tender.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour cream's acidity to produce gas that helps the cake rise.
Raisins
Add chewy sweetness and moisture throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Dredging the fruit with flour. Heavy dried fruit sinks to the bottom of a batter during baking. Tossing it in a little flour helps the pieces grip the batter and stay suspended as the cake sets.

Swap the mace

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

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

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