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Dessert

Poor Man's Plum Pudding

A custard-based pudding made with stale bread, raisins, eggs, milk, sugar, cinnamon, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,390 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Poor Man's Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the bread and remove the crusts.

  2. Butter the bread slices thinly and layer them in a greased pudding dish, sprinkling raisins between each layer.

Make the custard

  1. Heat the milk, then stir in the sugar and salt, and pour over the beaten eggs.

  2. Place a heavy saucer on top of the bread and soak it with the custard mixture.

  3. Let it stand for 30 minutes.

Bake and serve

  1. Set the dish in a pan of boiling water, cover closely, and cook for 1 hour, ensuring the water remains at a hard boil.

  2. Turn out the pudding and serve with a liquid 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. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Eggs
Set the custard so the bread and raisins hold together as the pudding cooks.
Stale bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the custard to become tender.
Milk
Forms the liquid custard that soaks the bread and sets when cooked.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Keeping the water at a hard boil. The pudding cooks gently in a water bath, and the water must stay at a hard boil so the custard sets evenly. If the water drops, the custard cooks slowly and may turn out uneven or watery.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, bread, sugar, cinnamon, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinthe original
  4. Applefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, bread, sugar, cinnamon, butter. 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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