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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed dessert made with suet, sugar, eggs, spices, brandy, milk, flour, raisins, currants, and citron.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop and cream the suet with the sugar.

  2. Mix in the beaten eggs, nutmeg, cloves, mace, salt, brandy, and milk.

  3. Add enough flour to create a thin batter.

  4. Seed and chop the raisins.

  5. Wash the currants.

  6. Slice the citron.

  7. Sprinkle the fruits with flour to prevent them from sinking.

Steam

  1. Steam the mixture for 5 to 8 hours.

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 + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 moist, tender texture as it melts during cooking.
Eggs
Bind the batter and give the pudding structure as they set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps cream the suet into a light base.
Raisins
Provide chewy pockets of sweetness and moisture throughout the pudding.
Flour
Thickens the batter and gives the pudding its body.

The step that matters

Sprinkle the fruits with flour. Flour coats the raisins, currants and citron so they are lighter and less likely to sink to the bottom of the thin batter as it steams.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, nutmeg, clove, brandy, milk, flour. 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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