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Dessert

Excellent Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, suet, raisins, currants, candied peel, spices, and eggs, baked for six hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Excellent Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stir the baking soda into the buttermilk.

  2. In a large bowl, combine the flour, raisins, suet, and salt.

  3. In another bowl, beat the egg yolks and whites separately until stiff.

Make and cook the pudding

  1. Add the spices, salt, peels, sugar, raisins, currants, bread crumbs, and suet to the beaten eggs.

  2. Mix in the lemon juice and combine everything until smooth.

  3. Pour the mixture into a pudding cloth, bag, or mold.

  4. Boil for 6 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with a sauce of your choice.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

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

  5. Orange + cinnamontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten separately until stiff, they lighten the batter and help it set with structure.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic buttermilk to release gas, helping the pudding rise and lighten.
Buttermilk
Its acidity activates the baking soda and adds tenderness to the batter.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich during long boiling.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding body and a soft, dense texture.

The step that matters

Beating the eggs separately until stiff. Whites beaten to stiff peaks trap air that lightens the batter. Under-beaten whites leave the pudding dense, while over-beaten whites turn dry and grainy and can collapse when folded in.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (buttermilk, flour, raisin, orange, lemon, nutmeg, cinnamon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against buttermilk, flour, raisin, orange, lemon, nutmeg, 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.

More plum pudding recipes

English 165Christmas 156Sauce 71Eggless 34Baked 33Vegetable 19 See all 649 →

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