Skip to main content
Dessert

Black or Fruit Cake

A dense cake made with flour, butter, sugar, eggs, raisins, citron, spices, brandy, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Black or 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 your oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Beat the eggs until very light.

  3. Mix the sugar with the beaten eggs.

  4. Cream the flour with the butter, reserving 2-3 tablespoons of flour.

Make the batter

  1. Combine the flour and butter mixture with the egg and sugar mixture.

  2. Stir in the brandy, sherry, citron, spices, and raisins.

  3. Chop the raisins finely and coat them with the reserved flour before adding.

  4. Mix everything together well with a wooden spoon.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into pans and bake for 5 hours.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 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

Eggs
Beaten eggs give the batter structure and lift when combined with the other ingredients.
Butter
Creamed with the flour, butter adds richness and a tender crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dense batter together as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps tenderise it when creamed with the eggs.
Raisins
Add sweetness and moisture, and are coated in flour so they stay suspended in the batter.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavour, and its alcohol helps keep the cake moist.

The step that matters

Chop the raisins finely and coat them with the reserved flour before adding. Flour-coated fruit is less likely to sink to the bottom of a dense, heavy batter. Evenly distributed fruit keeps the cake consistent from top to bottom.

Swap the mace

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

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

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

More fruit cake recipes

White 89Black 40Christmas 29Eggless 27Molasses 23Apple 17 See all 952 →

You might also like

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesBrandy PeachesBrandy Peaches68 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesBrandy CreamBrandy Cream21 recipes