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Dessert

Simple Plum Pudding

A pudding made from ground rice, flour, suet, sugar, raisins, and milk, boiled for three hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Simple Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. In a large bowl, mix together the ground rice, flour, chopped suet, sugar, seeded raisins, and milk until well combined.

  2. Add the vinegar and baking soda to the mixture and stir until incorporated.

  3. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the pudding for three hours.

  2. Serve with lemon 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. Rice + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Rice + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Ground rice
Gives the pudding a tender, slightly grainy body as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Provides structure so the pudding holds its shape when cooked.
Chopped suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning at the surface.
Baking soda
Reacts with the vinegar to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Vinegar
Reacts with the baking soda to help the pudding rise and turn lighter.

The step that matters

Adding the vinegar and baking soda. Baking soda needs an acid to react and release gas. Stirring the vinegar and baking soda in promptly, then getting the pudding into the mold, keeps the bubbles trapped so the pudding rises rather than going flat.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, flour, sugar, milk, vinegar):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, flour, sugar, milk, vinegar. 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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