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Dessert

English Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with raisins, currants, suet, bread crumbs, spices, and preserved lemon, sweetened with sugar and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

English Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Pour the scalded milk over the bread crumbs and let it soak.

  2. In a large bowl, mix the soaked crumbs with the grated lemon rind, raisins, salt, currants, chopped suet, grated nutmeg, mixed spices, flour, brandy, sugar, eggs, preserved lemon, and orange peel. Combine all ingredients thoroughly.

Steam the puddings

  1. Divide the mixture into four portions and place each in a pudding cloth or mold.

  2. Steam each pudding for six hours.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  4. Currant + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and add richness and structure as they set during steaming.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and gives a rich texture.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the scalded milk and help give the pudding a tender, moist body.
Flour
Adds body and helps the pudding hold its shape while steaming.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown slightly as it cooks.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavour and helps preserve the pudding.

The step that matters

Combine all ingredients thoroughly. Uneven mixing leaves pockets of dry flour or crumbs and clumps of suet, so some portions set unevenly. A well-blended batter steams into a uniformly moist, evenly textured pudding.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, raisin, nutmeg, bread, flour, brandy, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, raisin, nutmeg, bread, flour, brandy, 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.

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