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Dessert

English Fruit Cake

A steamed and baked cake made with butter, currants, raisins, almonds, spices, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

English Fruit Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Cream the butter and gradually add half the sugar, beating thoroughly.

  2. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then add the remaining sugar to the egg whites and set them aside.

  3. Beat the egg yolks until thick and lemon-colored, then add the beaten yolks to the butter mixture.

  4. Fold in the egg whites gently.

  5. Mix the milk, fruit, nuts, and flour sifted with mace, cinnamon, and baking soda into the batter.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into buttered deep pans.

  2. Cover the pans loosely with buttered paper and tie the paper firmly in place.

  3. Steam for 3 hours.

  4. Bake for 2½ hours at 300°F (150°C).

  5. Alternatively, bake for 4 hours at 275°F (135°C) without steaming.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with sugar to form a tender, rich crumb structure.
Eggs
Egg whites add lift and airiness, while yolks add richness and structure.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the heavy fruit and batter together.
Baking soda
Reacts to lift the batter and help it rise.
Light brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the batter brown.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whipped egg whites hold air that gives the cake lift. Folding gently keeps that air in; vigorous stirring deflates the foam and leaves a denser cake.

Swap the mace

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

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

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