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Dessert

Cottage Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with beef suet, flour, baking powder, bread crumbs, raisins, currants, sugar, nutmeg, lemon rind, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Cottage Plum Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine shredded beef suet, flour, baking powder, bread crumbs, raisins, currants, sugar, grated nutmeg, chopped lemon rind, and beaten eggs in a bowl.

  2. Tie the mixture in a floured cloth.

  3. Boil the tied mixture for 2.5 to 3 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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure as they set during cooking.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch that gives the pudding its body and firm texture.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the mixture and helps it rise.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and lend a soft, tender crumb to the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil the tied mixture for 2.5 to 3 hours. The cloth must be tied loosely enough for the pudding to swell, and the water must keep simmering steadily. Uneven or weak boiling can leave the centre dense or undercooked, since the long gentle heat is what sets the eggs and cooks the starch through.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, bread, raisin, sugar, nutmeg, lemon. 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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