Skip to main content
Dessert

Baked Plum Pudding

A baked dessert made from stale bread, milk, dried fruits, spices, butter, eggs, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Baked Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Prepare the ingredients a day in advance and cover them tightly.

  2. Boil the milk and pour it hot over the grated bread; cover and let steep for 1 hour.

Make the batter

  1. Mix the butter, sugar, spices, and citron into the bread mixture once it has cooled.

  2. Gradually stir in the beaten eggs and then add the dredged raisins and currants.

  3. Mix everything thoroughly and transfer to a buttered dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 2 hours.

  2. Serve warm with wine sauce or a mixture of wine and 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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  5. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Soaked in hot milk, it absorbs liquid and forms the soft body of the pudding.
Eggs
Beaten eggs set during baking, binding the pudding and giving it structure.
Milk
Steeped with the bread, it provides moisture and makes the crumb tender.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, contributing to a tender texture and flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning on the surface during baking.
Currants and raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Gradually stir in the beaten eggs. Adding eggs slowly to the cooled bread mixture helps them blend evenly, so the eggs do not scramble and the pudding sets smoothly when baked.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, currant, raisin, nutmeg, cinnamon, sugar):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, currant, raisin, nutmeg, cinnamon, sugar. 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 →

You might also like

Bread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipes