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Dessert

Fruit Cake

A sweet cake made with raisins, currants, dates, figs, nuts, and spices, baked at 300°F for 2½ hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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

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. Prepare the fruit and coat it with flour.

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, mix the butter and brown sugar until creamy.

  2. Add the buttermilk and flour, mixing until combined.

  3. Fold in the prepared fruit and nuts.

  4. Pour the batter into a greased baking pan.

Bake

  1. Bake at 300°F (150°C) for 2½ 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. Buttermilk + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,721 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sugar + buttermilktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  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

Butter
Creams with sugar to add fat and a tender crumb structure.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the cake brown.
Eggs
Bind the batter and give structure as the cake sets.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the cake as it bakes.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk to help the cake rise.
Raisins
Add moisture, chewiness and sweetness throughout the cake.

The step that matters

Coat the fruit with flour before folding it in. Flour-coated fruit is less likely to sink to the bottom of the batter, so the fruit stays spread through the cake as it bakes.

Swap the currant

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

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

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