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Dessert

Raisins

A simple dish of raisins stewed in cold water, optionally flavored with lemon or dried red currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and red currant work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 309 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Raisins

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pick raisins from the stems, discarding any imperfect ones.

  2. Wash the raisins and stew them in 2½ pints of cold water for 40 to 50 minutes until tender.

  3. Ensure there is plenty of juice when done.

  4. If the sauce is too sweet, add the peeled and sliced lemon after removing from heat.

  5. Alternatively, cook a handful of dried red currants with the raisins.

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. Lemon + red curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

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

  2. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Raisin + red curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10 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

Raisins
Provide the main sweetness and body, softening as they stew to form a tender fruit base.
Cold water
Hydrates the dried fruit so it plumps and stews into a juicy sauce.
Lemon
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness of the stewed raisins.

The step that matters

Stewing until tender with plenty of juice. Dried fruit needs enough time and liquid to rehydrate and soften fully. Stopping early leaves the raisins tough, and too little liquid lets the sauce dry out rather than forming a juicy syrup.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, red currant):

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Currantfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, red currant. 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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