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Dessert

Plumb Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, currants, raisins, bread, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,180 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, creamy. The science ↓

Plumb Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mince the beef suet very finely.

  2. Wash the currants and stone the raisins, then mince them.

  3. Boil enough milk to soak the bread and suet.

  4. Break the bread into pieces and pour the hot milk over it.

Assemble and steam

  1. Mix all ingredients together, pour into a pudding mold, cover the mold and tie it down securely.

  2. Steam for over an hour until cooked through.

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. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  2. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef suet
Adds fat that enriches the pudding and keeps it moist and tender as it cooks.
Bread
Soaks up the hot milk and gives the pudding its body and soft, crumbly structure.
Milk
Softens the bread and suet and moistens the mixture so it steams evenly.
Currants
Add sweetness, chewy texture and fruit flavour throughout the pudding.
Raisins
Add sweetness, chewy texture and concentrated fruit flavour throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steam for over an hour until cooked through. Gentle, steady steam heats the pudding evenly so the bread and suet set through to the centre. Boiling too hard or letting the water run low can leave it uneven or dry.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, raisin, bread, milk. 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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