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Dessert

Plum Purding

A British pudding of dried fruit, suet, bread crumbs, eggs and spices, boiled in a cloth or mold.

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 ↓

Plum Purding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the batter

  1. In a large bowl, mix together the bread crumbs, chopped suet, and flour.

  2. In another bowl, beat the eggs and add the milk.

  3. Dissolve baking soda in the milk mixture, then combine with the egg mixture.

  4. Pour the wet ingredients into the dry mixture and stir well.

  5. Add the stoned raisins, currants, mixed peel, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and salt, then mix thoroughly.

Boil the pudding

  1. Transfer the mixture to a pudding cloth or mold and boil for 4 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. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and structure that hold the dense pudding together.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set as it cooks, giving the pudding firmness.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding a soft, tender body.
Milk
Adds moisture and helps the batter come together smoothly.
Raisins
Add sweetness and a chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Mix thoroughly. Stirring the dried fruit, peel and spices fully through the batter spreads them evenly, so every slice has a similar flavour and texture.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

More plum pudding recipes

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

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