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Dessert

Plum Pudding, Baked

A baked plum pudding made with suet, flour, currants, raisins, candied peel, sugar, nutmeg, egg, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Plum Pudding, Baked

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the suet, salt, flour, baking powder, currants, raisins, candied peel, sugar, and nutmeg thoroughly.

  2. Combine the beaten egg with enough milk to make a thick batter and moisten the dry ingredients.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish.

  2. Bake in the preheated oven for 1.5 to 2 hours.

  3. Turn the pudding out before serving and dust with powdered sugar.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  5. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the pudding as the batter sets.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the pudding and gives it a lighter crumb.
Egg
Binds the dry ingredients together and helps set the pudding.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy fruit texture throughout the pudding.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy fruit texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Moistening the dry ingredients. The batter must be thick but fully moistened, since dry flour that is not hydrated stays floury and the pudding can turn out dense or crumbly.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, flour, raisin, sugar, nutmeg, egg, milk. 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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