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Dessert

Fruit Cake

A baked cake made with flour, sugar, butter, raisins, currants, orange peel, almonds, eggs, milk, baking powder, and lemon essence.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Beat the butter and sugar together until creamy.

  3. Whisk the eggs for five minutes.

Make the batter

  1. Add the eggs alternately with the flour and milk, mixing well.

  2. Add the prepared fruit, essence, and baking powder, and mix thoroughly.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased and lined cake tin.

  2. Bake for about two 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  4. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the cake's structure once mixed with the eggs and milk.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown and stay moist.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure and richness.
Baking powder
Releases gas that makes the cake rise.
Milk
Adds moisture and loosens the batter.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs alternately with the flour and milk. Adding eggs in small portions alongside the dry flour and milk helps the batter stay smooth and emulsified. Adding all the eggs at once can cause curdling, which may lead to a dense, uneven cake.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Cranberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, raisin, orange, almond, lemon. 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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