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Dessert

Christmas Plum Pudding

A steamed dessert made with suet, molasses, raisins, fruit, and spices, served with hard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 ↓

Christmas Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, combine the suet, sweet milk, molasses, and brown sugar.

  2. Add the sifted flour, reserving some for rolling the fruit.

  3. Stir in the raisins, chopped citron, and walnuts.

  4. Mix in the baking soda, salt, cream of tartar, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and beaten eggs.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

  2. Steam for 5 hours.

  3. Serve with hard 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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Walnut + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it steams.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help give the pudding its set structure.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic molasses to lift and lighten the pudding.
New orleans molasses
Adds dark color, moisture, and a deep, slightly acidic sweetness.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steam for 5 hours. Steaming must be gentle and steady, with the water kept at a simmer, so the pudding cooks through evenly without drying out. Letting the water boil dry or run low can scorch the mold or leave the center underdone.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, molasses, sugar, flour, raisin, cream, cinnamon):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, molasses, sugar, flour, raisin, cream, cinnamon. 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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