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Dessert

Plum Pudding Without Eggs

A steamed plum pudding made with flour, raisins, currants, suet, sugar, spices, lemon peel, and sago, without eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, combine flour, raisins, currants, suet, sugar, and salt.

  2. Add enough water to form a stiff batter.

  3. Color the batter with burnt sugar and add spices and grated lemon peel to taste.

Boil

  1. Just before boiling, stir in the raw sago.

  2. Place the mixture in a cloth and boil it, ensuring it is not shaped.

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

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

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the body of the batter and gives the pudding its structure as it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender while it boils.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Raw sago
Starch that swells and thickens with heat, giving a soft, slightly chewy texture.

The step that matters

Stirring in the sago just before boiling. Sago is a starch that thickens when heated in liquid. Adding it at the last moment keeps it from thickening and stiffening the batter before the pudding is set in the cloth and boiled.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, raisin, sugar, lemon. 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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