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Dessert

Delicious Plum Pudding

A rich, fruit‑laden pudding made with suet, crackers, raisins, currants, almonds, candied fruit, molasses, and spices, boiled and served with rum.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 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 ↓

Delicious Plum Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit and nuts

  1. Soak the raisins, currants, and almonds in hot water.

  2. Remove the skins from the almonds and chop them.

  3. Dry the raisins and currants on the back of the stove.

  4. Shave the orange peel, lemon peel, and citron finely (do not chop).

  5. Mix the fruit, nuts, and candied cherries with the flour and set aside.

Make the pudding

  1. Chop the suet finely, then add the cracker crumbs, bread crumbs, molasses, sugar, apples, grape juice, spices, and well-beaten eggs.

  2. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered mold and boil for five hours.

  3. After boiling, remove the lid of the mold.

  4. Dry the mold on the back of the stove or in a slow oven before storing for Christmas Day.

Serve

  1. Steam for at least one hour when ready to serve.

  2. Pour over one cup of rum and a little granulated sugar and light it up.

  3. Place holly in the center and serve with foaming sauce.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  4. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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.
Flour
Thickens the mixture and gives the pudding its body.
Molasses
Adds moisture, dark color, and a deep, sweet flavor.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich in texture.
Raisins
Add chewy sweetness and moisture throughout the pudding.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and soften the texture of the pudding.

The step that matters

Steam for at least one hour when ready to serve.. Reheating by steaming must be thorough so the pudding is heated through and softened again after its long drying and storage. Gentle, moist heat keeps it from drying out or becoming dense at the surface.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, bread, raisin, almond, orange, lemon, flour):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Cranberryfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, bread, raisin, almond, orange, lemon, 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.

More plum pudding recipes

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

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