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Dessert

Fruit Cake Without Eggs

A moist fruit cake made with butter, brown sugar, sour milk, flour, raisins, and spices, baked without eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Fruit Cake Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and brown sugar together.

  2. Slowly add the sour milk and baking soda, mixing well.

  3. Stir in the flour, chopped raisins, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, and cloves.

  4. Beat the mixture well and pour it into a solid pan.

Bake

  1. Bake 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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Flour + raisintop 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. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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 add fat and a tender crumb.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cake brown.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda to lift the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that makes the cake rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it sets.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

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