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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed plum pudding made with eggs, sugar, spices, milk, flour, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and plum work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 406 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a large bowl, combine the eggs, sugar, spices, and salt with 1 cup of milk.

  2. Stir in the floured fruit and mix well.

  3. Dissolve the baking soda in a little hot water and add it to the mixture.

  4. Add enough flour to make the mixture hold together.

Cook

  1. Boil for four to five hours.

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. Milk + plumtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together406 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during cooking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the pudding a moist, tender crumb.
Baking soda
Reacts with the batter to release gas, helping the pudding rise and lighten.
Flour
Gives the mixture body so it holds together rather than falling apart.
Milk
Adds moisture and richness, loosening the batter into a soft mixture.

The step that matters

Add enough flour to make the mixture hold together. Too little flour leaves the pudding loose and crumbly once boiled, while too much makes it dense. Flour starch thickens and sets with heat, so the batter should be firm enough to hold its shape but still moist.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Plumthe original

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