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Dessert

English Plum Pudding

A steamed plum pudding made with suet, sugar, bread crumbs, currants, raisins, mixed peel, whiskey, milk, and spices.

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

  1. In a large bowl, beat the eggs.

  2. Add the suet, sugar, bread crumbs, currants, raisins, mixed peel, whiskey, milk, baking powder, and spices, then mix well until combined.

  3. Add enough flour to make a stiff batter.

  4. Flour the fruit to prevent sinking.

Steam

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

  2. Steam for several hours until cooked through.

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. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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.
Suet
Adds richness and moisture, as its fat keeps the pudding tender.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding a soft, light body.
Currants
Provide sweetness, moisture and chewy fruit texture throughout the pudding.
Raisins
Add sweetness and moisture, plumping as they absorb liquid during steaming.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the pudding rise and lighten.

The step that matters

Flour the fruit to prevent sinking. Dense, wet fruit tends to sink to the bottom of a thick batter. Lightly coating it in flour helps it grip the batter and stay evenly distributed while the pudding steams.

Swap the currant

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

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

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