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Dessert

Plum-pudding, Boiled

A boiled plum pudding made with milk, eggs, sugar, flour, suet, bread crumbs, raisins, currants, citron, nutmeg, salt, baking powder, and brandy.

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 ↓

Plum-pudding, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Warm the milk, then beat the egg yolks and sugar together and stir in half of the milk.

  2. Add the flour and mix into a smooth batter, then stir in the remaining milk.

  3. Incorporate the suet and bread crumbs, then add the fruit.

  4. Mix well, then stir in the nutmeg, salt, baking powder, and brandy.

  5. Beat the egg whites with 1 tablespoon of sugar to stiff peaks and fold in last.

Steam the pudding

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold, leaving room for it to rise.

  2. Place the mold in boiling water and boil for 2 hours, ensuring the water does not float the mold.

  3. Replenish with boiling water if it boils down too low, and keep covered to retain steam.

Serve

  1. Serve with a wine sauce.

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

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

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Milk + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten whites trap air for lightness, while yolks enrich the batter and help bind it.
Flour
Forms the starch structure that holds the batter together as it cooks.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and give the pudding body and a soft crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking to help the pudding rise.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps stabilise the beaten egg whites.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Fold the stiffly beaten whites in last and gently, so the air they hold is not lost. That trapped air, together with the baking powder, is what lifts the pudding as it steams.

Swap the currant

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

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

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