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Dessert

Any Day Plum Pudding

A sweet pudding made with suet, raisins, currants, citron, egg, sweet milk, flour, salt, and baking powder, boiled in a cloth bag.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Any Day Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, combine chopped suet, raisins, currants, citron, egg, sweet milk, flour, salt, and baking powder, and mix until well combined.

  2. Transfer the mixture into a cloth bag and secure it tightly.

Cook

  1. Boil the bag in water for 3 hours.

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. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour 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

Suet
Adds richness and moisture, and melts during cooking to keep the pudding tender.
Flour
Forms the main structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Egg
Binds the ingredients together and adds structure to the batter.
Baking powder
Releases gas as it reacts, helping the pudding rise and lighten.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy moisture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Securing the cloth bag. If the bag is not tied tightly, water can seep in and make the pudding soggy and waterlogged. A well-sealed bag keeps the batter contained so it cooks evenly in the boiling water.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, egg, milk, 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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