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Dessert

English Plum Pudding

A dense, sweet pudding made with suet, sugars, spices, dried fruit, flour, and eggs, boiled in lard pails.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

English Plum Pudding

makes about 8 quarts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding mixture

  1. In a large bowl, combine suet, brown sugar, granulated sugar, cloves, allspice, cinnamon, bread crumbs, flour, baking powder, and salt.

  2. Add the seeded raisins, seedless raisins, currants, citron, and candied lemon peel, mixing thoroughly with your hands.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix the beaten eggs with enough warm water to achieve a pudding-like consistency, about 2 quarts. Stir the egg mixture into the dry ingredients with a spoon until well combined.

Fill and boil

  1. Grease lard pails and place a layer of currants at the bottom of each pail. Fill the pails two-thirds full with the pudding mixture and cover with lids.

  2. Place the pails in a large pot of boiling water, ensuring the water reaches halfway up the sides of the pails. Boil for 10 hours. This recipe makes about 8 quarts and can be stored for up to 2 years.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Adds richness and moistness, and carries flavour through the long steaming.
Eggs
Bind the dry ingredients together and help give the pudding its set structure.
All-purpose flour
Provides the bulk structure that holds the pudding together.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deep, molasses-like flavour.
Currants
Add fruit sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Baking powder
Helps the pudding rise and lighten as it cooks.

The step that matters

Keeping the water boiling around the pails. The pudding is cooked by steam and hot water surrounding the pails over a long time. If the water drops below halfway up the sides or stops boiling, the pudding cooks unevenly and may turn out dense or underdone.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, clove, allspice, cinnamon, bread, flour, raisin):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, clove, allspice, cinnamon, bread, flour, raisin. 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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