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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, baking soda, sour milk, salt, suet, and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, baking soda, sour milk, salt, suet, and raisins.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for three hours.

  2. Serve with hard 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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

Flour
Provides the starch and gluten that give the pudding its body and structure.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk's acid to release carbon dioxide, lifting the batter.
Sour milk
Its acidity activates the baking soda and keeps the pudding moist.
Suet
Melting fat adds richness and a moist, tender crumb.
Raisins
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Keep the steaming steady for three hours. Gentle, continuous heat lets the batter rise and set evenly. Top up boiling water as needed; if the water boils dry, the pudding turns out dense or underdone.

“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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