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Dessert

Light Fruit Cake

A baked cake made with butter, sugar, eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, raisins, dates, almonds, and citron peel.

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 ↓

Light Fruit Cake

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Line pans with buttered paper.

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  3. Stir in the milk.

  4. In another bowl, combine the flour and baking powder.

  5. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture.

  6. Fold in the raisins, seedless raisins, dates, almonds, and citron peel.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into the prepared pans.

  2. Bake for 2 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. 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  5. Dates + almondtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together217 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 trap air and add richness and tender texture.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during baking.
Flour
Forms the structure of the cake as it sets in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps cream the butter to hold air.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture. Adding flour in portions and mixing gently limits gluten development, keeping the crumb tender rather than tough.

Swap the dates

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Datesthe original

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

More fruit cake recipes

White 89Black 40Christmas 29Eggless 27Molasses 23Apple 17 See all 952 →

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