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Dessert

Fruit Cake

A dense cake made with sugar, butter, milk, baking soda, eggs, flour, raisins, currants, citron, brandy, wine, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter.

  2. Dissolve the baking soda in a little hot water and add it to the milk.

  3. Stir the milk into the creamed mixture.

  4. Gradually add the flour, then the beaten egg yolks, and finally the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  5. Fold in the remaining ingredients, ensuring to flour the chopped fruit well.

Bake and frost

  1. Bake in one large pan or several small pans.

  2. For frosting, use 5 tablespoons of sugar for each egg white.

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. Currant + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the batter, while whites beaten stiff add lightness and help the cake rise.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and adds richness and a tender crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake together as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the milk to produce gas, helping the cake rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps it brown and keep moisture.
Raisins
Add chewy sweetness and moisture throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Flouring the chopped fruit. Coating the fruit in flour helps it stay suspended in the batter instead of sinking to the bottom during baking.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Currantthe original

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