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Dessert

Mother’s Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made from bread, milk, suet, sugar, eggs, nutmeg, raisins, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,377 recipes. Both carry alpha-terpineol, which smells lilac, floral. The science ↓

Mother’s Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. Place the bread in a basin and pour the boiling milk over it.

  2. Once the bread is soft, add the suet, sugar, eggs, nutmegs, and raisins. Mix well and transfer to a buttered mold.

Boil and serve

  1. Tie the mold tightly in a cloth and boil for 4 hours or longer.

  2. Serve with a cold sauce made of butter, sugar, and brandy, blended into a thick froth.

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 + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Baker's loaf
Soaks up the boiling milk and forms the soft, moist body of the pudding.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist during long boiling.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm as it cooks.
Raisins
Provide concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the suet and eggs.

The step that matters

Boiling the tightly tied mold. The cloth must be tied snugly so water does not seep in and dilute the pudding, and the pot must keep boiling steadily for the full time so the eggs and bread set through to the centre.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, egg, nutmeg, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Lemonfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, egg, nutmeg, butter. 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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