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Dessert

Christmas Plum Pudding

A rich Christmas pudding of butter, suet, flour, eggs, dried fruit, spices and brandy, boiled in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Christmas Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Beat in the yolks of the eggs until smooth and light.

  3. Add the milk.

  4. Add the flour alternately with the beaten egg whites.

  5. Stir in the brandy and spices.

  6. Fold in the dredged fruit.

Cook

  1. Wring out a pudding cloth in hot water.

  2. Flour the inside of the cloth well.

  3. Pour the mixture into the cloth.

  4. Boil for 5 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Currant + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and, with the separately beaten whites, lighten its structure.
Flour
Forms the structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness through fat creamed with the sugar.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich during long boiling.
Raisins
Provide chewy sweetness and body throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps cream the butter to a light texture.

The step that matters

Boil for 5 hours. Steady, long boiling cooks the dense batter through and sets it. If the water is allowed to drop below a simmer, the pudding cooks unevenly and may turn heavy or soggy.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, raisin, egg, milk, brandy. 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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