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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, walnuts, raisins, currants, spices, milk, molasses, flour, sugar, butter, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, combine the suet, walnuts, raisins, currants, lemon extract, cloves, cinnamon, baking soda mixture, sweet milk, molasses, and flour. Mix well until all ingredients are combined.

Steam and make the sauce

  1. Transfer the mixture to a pudding mold and steam for 4 hours.

  2. For the sauce, warm the sugar and butter in a saucepan until melted but not boiling. Remove from heat and stir in the beaten eggs just before serving.

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. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  3. Walnut + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  5. Walnut + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dense pudding together as it steams.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich during long steaming.
Molasses
Adds dark sweetness and moisture, and gives the pudding its color and flavor.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses and lightens the batter so it rises and becomes tender.
Eggs
Bind the sauce and thicken it gently when stirred in off the heat.

The step that matters

Stir the eggs in off the heat. Eggs scramble and curdle if they get too hot, so the sauce must be removed from heat before the beaten eggs are stirred in.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, raisin, lemon, clove, cinnamon, milk, molasses):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, raisin, lemon, clove, cinnamon, milk, molasses. 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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