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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, breadcrumbs, suet, raisins, currants, apple, candied peel, eggs, sugar, brandy, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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

Make the pudding

  1. Mix together flour, bread crumbs, suet, raisins, currants, minced apple, orange peel, lemon peel, eggs, sugar, brandy, and salt.

  2. Tie the mixture in a buttered cloth that has been soaked in warm water.

Cook

  1. Boil for 6.5 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Currant + appletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help give the cooked pudding its set structure.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together after boiling.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and add body, giving the pudding a tender, crumbly texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps round out the flavour of the dried fruit.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth tightly and keep it submerged. A loose or poorly buttered cloth lets the pudding stick or swell unevenly, and water entering the cloth makes the pudding soggy. A well-sealed cloth holds the shape and keeps the texture dense and moist during the long boil.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, bread, raisin, apple, orange, lemon, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, bread, raisin, apple, orange, lemon, 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 →

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