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Dessert

White Plum Pudding

A steamed or boiled pudding made with sugar, butter, eggs, milk, flour, fruit, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

White Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs in a large bowl.

  2. Add sugar, butter, salt, and milk to the eggs and mix well.

  3. Stir in the flour that has been mixed with the fruit.

  4. Just before cooking, stir in the baking powder.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil or steam for 2 hours.

  2. Serve hot with 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + curranttop 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during cooking.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together when cooked.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture in the finished pudding.
Royal baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to lighten the pudding as it cooks.
Raisins
Add moisture and sweetness through the pudding.

The step that matters

Stir in the baking powder just before cooking. Baking powder starts releasing gas as soon as it meets moisture and heat. If it sits in the batter too long, it loses lift, so the pudding can turn out dense rather than light.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, milk, flour, raisin, nutmeg. 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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