Skip to main content
Dessert

Plain Canadian Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with bread crumbs, carrot, flour, sugar, molasses, suet, raisins, currants, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and raisin 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 ↓

Plain Canadian Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, combine bread crumbs, grated carrot, flour, sugar, molasses, suet, raisins, currants, baking soda, and milk.

  2. Mix in baking powder, chopped lemon peel, chopped dates, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, and salt.

  3. Pour the mixture into a pudding mold.

Steam

  1. 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + curranttop 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 + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Molasses + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Molasses
Adds dark color, moisture, and a deep sweet flavor to the pudding.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses's acidity to help the pudding rise and lighten.
Baking powder
Adds additional lift so the pudding becomes light rather than dense.
Bread crumbs
Absorbs liquid and adds body, helping the pudding hold a moist texture.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes