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Dessert

Plum Cake

A rich fruit cake made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, dried fruit, spices, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Plum Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter until smooth, then mix in the sifted sugar.

  2. Beat the egg yolks and whites separately for half an hour, then combine them.

  3. Add the sifted flour, lemon zest, confit orange and lemon peel, mace, and nutmeg.

  4. Stir in the brandy and orange flower water.

Add fruit and bake

  1. Prepare a baking hoop.

  2. Fold in the currants and stoned raisins.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 2½ 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Orange + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and gives the cake a rich, tender crumb.
Eggs
Whisked whites add lift and structure, while yolks add richness and help set the crumb.
Sifted flour
Provides the main structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps create a fine, even texture when creamed with butter.
Currants
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the cake.
Stoned raisins
Add chewy, sweet fruit pieces that moisten the crumb as the cake bakes.

The step that matters

Beating the egg yolks and whites separately. Beating the whites separately and folding them in traps air, which gives the cake lift. Beating for the full half hour helps build a stable foam, and combining them gently preserves that air.

Swap the mace

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

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

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