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Dessert

Albert Pudding

A baked pudding of butter, eggs, flour, loaf sugar, lemon rind, and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Albert Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Beat the butter until smooth.

  2. Gradually mix in the beaten eggs.

  3. Add the flour and loaf sugar with the grated lemon rind.

  4. Fold in the stoned raisins.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered and lined mold.

  2. Bake until set.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Lemon + raisintop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Flour + sugartop 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

Butter
Creams with sugar and adds richness and a tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the batter and set during baking to give the pudding structure.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the pudding together as it sets.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the batter brown lightly in the oven.
Stoned raisins
Provide chewy pockets of sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Baking is judged by setting rather than a stated time, so underbaking leaves the eggs and flour wet in the centre, while overbaking dries and toughens the pudding. Check that the centre is firm before removing it from the oven.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Coconutfits about as well

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