Skip to main content
Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with canned plums, flour, butter, eggs, milk, baking powder, and salt, served with hard sauce and plum juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix flour with baking powder and add salt, eggs, milk, and butter.

  2. Roll the dough on a floured surface to about 1 inch thick.

  3. Strain the plums through a colander and place them in the center of the dough, then fold the dough over to enclose the plums.

Steam and serve

  1. Place the pudding in a mold and steam for 1½ hours.

  2. Serve with hard sauce.

  3. Serve with heated plum juice mixed with a little sugar and cinnamon.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Plum + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together406 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Forms the dough structure that encloses the plums and holds the pudding together.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming, helping the pudding rise and become light.
Eggs
Add structure and richness, helping the dough set and bind.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a richer flavour in the dough.
Canned plums
Provide sweet-tart fruit flavour and moisture inside the pudding.

The step that matters

Enclosing the plums in the dough. If the dough is rolled too thin or the plums are not fully sealed inside, juice can leak out during steaming and the pudding may become soggy or fall apart. Draining the plums well also limits excess liquid.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, milk, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, milk, 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.

More plum pudding recipes

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

You might also like

Mixed Fruit SherbetMixed Fruit Sherbet6 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes