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Dessert

Impromptu Plum Pudding

A pudding made from minced meat, flour, eggs, sugar, butter, and served with brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Impromptu Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Whip the yolks of the eggs and stir them into the minced meat, adding sugar if needed.

  2. Beat the mixture hard for 2-3 minutes.

  3. Fold in the whisked egg whites and the flour alternately.

Boil and serve

  1. Butter a large mold and pour in the mixture, leaving room for the pudding to swell.

  2. Boil the pudding for 5 hours without interruption.

  3. Turn the pudding out onto a hot dish, pour brandy over it, and light it just before serving.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,127 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter 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

Eggs
Whites are whisked to add lift, and yolks enrich and bind the mixture.
Flour
Provides structure so the pudding holds its shape after steaming.
Made mince-meat
Supplies the moist, spiced, fruity body of the pudding.

The step that matters

Leaving room in the mold. The pudding swells as it cooks, so filling the mold too full can cause it to overflow or cook unevenly. Leaving headspace allows the rising batter to expand safely.

“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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