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Dessert

Old English Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with milk, bread crumbs, suet, dried fruit, spices, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Dates and orange work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 151 recipes. Both carry 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol, which smells clove, smoky. The science ↓

Old English Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Pour the milk over the bread crumbs and mix well.

  2. Add the brown sugar, salt, and chopped suet to the mixture.

  3. Stir in the raisins, dates, nut meats, citron, and orange peel.

  4. Beat the yolks of the eggs and add them to the mixture.

  5. Mix in the flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

  6. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold and steam 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. Dates + orangetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together151 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  2. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Bread + datestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together100 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  4. Raisin + datestop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together358 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the batter, while whites folded in lighten its texture.
Flour
Provides starch that gives the pudding its body and structure as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk to form a soft base that keeps the pudding moist.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and tender during steaming.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a molasses-like depth of flavour.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently. Egg whites hold air from beating, and overmixing deflates them, which makes the pudding denser. Gentle folding keeps the batter light.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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