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Dessert

Plain Plum-pudding

A steamed pudding made with sugar, butter, eggs, flour, and raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Plain Plum-pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter until well combined.

  2. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  3. Sift in the flour and raisins, and mix until just combined.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

  2. Boil for 2 hours in a pot of water.

  3. Serve warm with 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps cream with the butter to trap air.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and creaming it with sugar gives the pudding a tender texture.
Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as the pudding sets while cooking.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Raisins
Add chewy pockets of sweetness and moisture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs one at a time. Adding eggs gradually lets each one emulsify fully into the creamed butter and sugar. Adding them all at once can cause the batter to curdle or separate, which affects the final texture.

“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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