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Dessert

Christmas Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, flour, sugar, eggs, dried fruit, nuts, spices, and milk or wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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. Beat the eggs and sugar together until creamy.

  2. Gradually add the milk, then the chopped suet.

  3. Sift the baking powder with the flour and mix it into the batter.

  4. If using, add the wine or brandy, then stir in the bread crumbs, salt, and spices.

  5. In a separate bowl, dredge the raisins, mixed peel, chopped nuts, and currants with flour, then mix them into the batter.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish and steam for six hours.

  2. For best results, prepare the pudding the day before and steam it on the day you plan to serve it.

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. Raisin + nutstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 add richness and structure as they set.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps it turn light and creamy when beaten.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it steams.
Flour
Provides the starch and structure that hold the pudding together.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter to lighten the pudding's texture.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding for six hours. Steam heats the pudding gently and evenly, cooking the eggs and flour through while keeping it moist. Steaming for too short a time leaves the centre dense and undercooked.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, egg, beef, bread, flour, raisin, nuts):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg, beef, bread, flour, raisin, nuts. 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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