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Christmas Plum Pudding

A rich, fruit-filled pudding made with suet, bread crumbs, flour, apples, raisins, currants, sultanas, sugar, spices, eggs, brandy or rum, and stout.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 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. Mix the suet and bread crumbs together.

  2. Add the flour and sliced apples, then mix well.

  3. Incorporate the raisins, currants, sultanas, and brown sugar.

  4. Stir in the crystallized orange peel, citron peel, ginger, and split almonds.

  5. Add the juices from the orange and lemon, mixed spices, eggs, brandy or rum, and stout.

  6. Mix all ingredients thoroughly.

Fill and boil

  1. Fill buttered molds with the mixture.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Orange + gingertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  4. Apple + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

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.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding its body and structure.
Flour
Helps bind the mixture and set its structure as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the ingredients together and help set the pudding.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, molasses-like flavour.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout.

The step that matters

Boil the molds for 8 hours. The pudding must be sealed tightly in buttered molds and kept at a steady boil so it cooks through evenly. Water that boils dry or leaks in can make the pudding soggy or uneven.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, flour, apple, raisin, sugar, orange, ginger):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, apple, raisin, sugar, orange, ginger. 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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