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Dessert

Inexpensive Fruit Cake, Eggless

An eggless fruit cake made with sugar, shortening, sour milk, flour, spices, dried fruit, and baked at 350°F.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Inexpensive Fruit Cake, Eggless

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the sugar and shortening until well combined.

  2. Stir in the sour milk and baking soda.

  3. Add the flour, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice, mixing until smooth.

  4. Toss the currants, raisins, citron, and figs in ½ cup of flour, then fold into the batter.

Bake

  1. Pour the batter into a greased baking pan and bake for about 45-50 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the cake and helps keep it tender and moist.
Shortening
Adds fat for a tender crumb and rich texture.
Sour milk
Provides moisture and acidity that reacts with the baking soda to lift the batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that makes the cake rise.
Flour
Provides the structure that sets the cake's crumb as it bakes.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Folding in the dried fruit. Tossing the currants, raisins, citron and figs in flour helps keep them suspended rather than sinking to the bottom. Folding gently avoids overmixing, which would toughen the batter.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, milk, flour, cinnamon, clove, allspice, raisin):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, flour, cinnamon, clove, allspice, raisin. 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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