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Dessert

English Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, bread crumbs, sugar, dried fruit, spices, milk, eggs, and baked with a hard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,390 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

English Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, combine the suet, bread crumbs, sugar, raisins, currants, citron, and candied lemon peel.

  2. In another bowl, whisk together the milk, eggs, cinnamon, cloves, mace, grated nutmeg, and baking soda.

  3. Pour the wet mixture into the dry ingredients and mix well.

Steam and serve

  1. Transfer the mixture to a well-buttered mold.

  2. Steam the pudding for 8 hours.

  3. To make the hard sauce, beat together the sugar and butter until creamy, then mix in the egg yolks and flavor with lemon.

  4. Serve the pudding warm 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. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 a tender, moist crumb as it melts during steaming.
Bread crumbs
Provides the body that soaks up the liquid and holds the pudding together.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm as it steams.
Milk
Hydrates the bread crumbs and dry fruit, forming the batter's moisture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic components to lighten the pudding and aid rising.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy moisture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding. Steam must be kept steadily gentle and the water level maintained over the full 8 hours. Uneven or boiling water can make the pudding dense or cause the mold to leak, and the long, even heat is what cooks the egg-rich batter through.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sugar, raisin, lemon, milk, egg, cinnamon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, raisin, lemon, milk, egg, cinnamon. 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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