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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, currants, grated carrots, grated potatoes, butter, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and potato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,107 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Plum Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix all ingredients together, adding a little salt and any other approved seasoning.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the mixture in a buttered basin for 1.5 hours.

  2. Serve with sweet sauce, and add a large spoonful of treacle if desired.

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. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

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

  4. Flour + carrottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the main structure and body that holds the pudding together.
Currants
Add sweetness and a chewy texture as dried fruit.
Grated carrots
Add moisture and gentle sweetness to the mixture.
Grated potatoes
Their starch helps bind the mixture and adds moisture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, moist crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the savoury notes of the vegetables.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture for 1.5 hours. A steady, sustained boil cooks the flour and potato starches through, so the pudding sets and holds together. Stopping early leaves it raw in the centre and loose in texture.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, carrot, potato, butter, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, carrot, potato, butter, sugar. 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.

More plum pudding recipes

English 165Christmas 156Sauce 71Eggless 34Baked 33Vegetable 19 See all 649 →

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