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Dessert

Almond and Raisin Fudging

A boiled cake made with bread crumbs, milk, suet, currants, almonds, raisins, lemon, eggs, and ale.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Almond and Raisin Fudging

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the stale bread crumbs in the milk.

  2. Add the suet, currants, sugar, lemon juice, lemon rind, beaten eggs, and ale. Mix well.

  3. Butter a mold or basin and arrange the raisins and almonds in rows around it.

  4. Pour the mixture into the mold over the raisins and almonds.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the mold in boiling water and boil for 3 hours.

  2. Turn out and serve with wine sauce.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Lemon + almondtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and set it firm when cooked.
Stale bread crumbs
Soak up the milk to give the pudding body and a soft crumb.
Suet
Adds fat that makes the pudding rich and moist.
Almonds
Add nutty flavor and a pleasant bite against the soft pudding.

The step that matters

Boiling the mold. The mold must stay submerged in gently boiling water for the full time so the eggs and crumbs set evenly. If the water drops too low, the pudding cooks unevenly and may turn out heavy or underdone in the middle.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, sugar, lemon, egg, butter, almond):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, sugar, lemon, egg, butter, almond. 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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