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Dessert

Hot Almond Pudding

A boiled pudding made with ground almonds, sugar, suet, eggs, dried fruit, spices, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Hot Almond Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine ground almonds, sugar, chopped suet, eggs, currants, raisins, preserved cherries, angelica, ground mace, flour, water, grated nutmeg, essence of almonds, and ground ginger in a large bowl.

  2. Mix all ingredients together for 10 minutes until well combined.

  3. Transfer the mixture to a pudding cloth or mold and boil for 3 hours or more.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Almond + raisintop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Almond + angelicatop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together135 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Ground almonds
Provide the main body and nutty almond flavor of the pudding.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks.
Flour
Gives the pudding structure so it holds its shape when boiled.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the pudding a tender crumb.

The step that matters

Boiling the pudding. The pudding must boil gently for a long time so the flour and eggs set through and the suet renders evenly. Boiling too hard or too briefly can leave the centre dense or wet.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against almond, sugar, egg, currant, raisin, angelica, flour. 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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