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Dessert

Milk Sweetmeat

A sweet confection made from almond paste, milk, sugar, and ghee or butter, set into squares.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and ghee work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 344 recipes. The science ↓

Milk Sweetmeat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grind the almonds into a paste.

Make the sweetmeat

  1. Boil the milk with the sugar until partially thick.

  2. Add the ground almonds and cook until quite thick.

  3. Stir in the ghee or butter and mix well.

  4. Once thick and firm, remove from heat and pour into a well-buttered dish.

  5. Cut into squares before it cools.

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. Almond + gheetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together344 recipes
  2. Almond + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + gheetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together353 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Almonds
Provide the bulk and nutty flavour, and thicken the mixture as they cook.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the milk thicken into a firm, sliceable mass.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that reduces and thickens into the sweetmeat.
Ghee or butter
Adds richness and fat that gives a smooth texture and glossy finish.

The step that matters

Cooking until thick and firm before removing from heat. Under-cooking leaves the mixture too soft to set into squares, while over-cooking can make it dry and crumbly. Stopping at the point where it pulls away from the pan and holds its shape gives a firm, sliceable result as it cools.

“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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