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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed dessert made with bread crumbs, suet, flour, raisins, currants, walnuts, molasses, and spices.

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

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. In a large bowl, combine bread crumbs, sugar, suet, flour, and walnuts.

  2. In another bowl, mix sour milk with baking soda and add to the dry ingredients.

  3. Stir in molasses, raisins, currants, orange peel, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg until well combined.

Steam and serve

  1. Transfer the mixture to a greased pudding mold.

  2. Steam for 3 to 4 hours.

  3. Serve with hard sauce or hot 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. 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

Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together as it steams.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic sour milk to produce gas that lightens the batter.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender during long steaming.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color, and moisture with a deep flavor.
Sour milk
Its acidity activates the baking soda and adds tenderness to the crumb.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steam for 3 to 4 hours. Steaming must stay gentle and steady for the full time so the pudding cooks through evenly. Letting the water boil dry or drop too low leaves the center dense and uncooked.

Swap the currant

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

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

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