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Dessert

Fruit Cake

A baked cake with sugar, currants, raisins, citron, butter, eggs, flour, baking powder, and grape juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Fruit Cake

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

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

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together until smooth.

  2. Add the egg yolks, grape juice, and beaten egg whites to the mixture.

  3. Sift in the flour and baking powder, and mix well.

  4. Stir in the currants, raisins, and citron.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a prepared pan and 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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 beaten whites add lift and a light crumb.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it traps air and gives the cake a tender, rich texture.
Flour
Its proteins set during baking, forming the structure that holds the fruit.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, helping the cake rise and turn light.
Sugar
Sweetens the cake and, creamed with butter, helps create a fine, even crumb.
Raisins
Add moisture and chewy sweetness as the cake bakes.

The step that matters

Stir in the currants, raisins, and citron. Heavy fruit can sink to the bottom of the pan. Tossing the fruit in a little flour before folding it in helps it stay suspended in the batter as it bakes.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Grapethe original

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