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Dessert

Honey Fruit Cake

A dense cake made with honey, butter, flour, eggs, spices, and candied fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Honey Fruit Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a very slow oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the fruit and flour

  1. Cut all the candied fruit except the cherries into small pieces.

  2. Place the fruit in a large dish and sift over half the flour, mixing thoroughly.

  3. Sift the baking soda with the remaining flour.

Make the batter

  1. Bring the honey and butter to a boil, then add the spices while still hot.

  2. When the mixture is cool, add the beaten yolks of the eggs, then the flour and grape juice or jelly, and the beaten egg whites.

  3. Finally, add the fruit.

Steam and bake

  1. Divide the dough into three or four parts and place in buttered tins covered with buttered paper tied loosely over the top.

  2. Steam for five hours, remove the paper, and bake at 300°F (150°C) for one hour.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Vanilla + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  4. Honey + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,262 recipes

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

  5. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Honey
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps keep the cake soft.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the cake sets.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the fruit within the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts to lift and lighten the batter as it cooks.

The step that matters

Steam before baking. Steaming for a long period keeps the dense fruit batter moist and cooks it through before the short dry-oven stage browns the surface. Removing the paper too early or skipping the steam can leave the centre gummy or dry.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Blueberryfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against honey, vanilla, butter, raisin, flour, egg, cinnamon. 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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