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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, sugar, candied peel, dried fruit, flour, eggs, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the pudding

  1. Mix flour, salt, mixed spice, sugar, raisins, candied peel, bread crumbs, sultanas, and currants in a large bowl.

  2. Add beaten eggs and stir the mixture for 25 minutes.

Fill and wrap

  1. Butter a pudding mold and fill it with the mixture.

  2. Scald a clean cloth.

  3. Flour the scalded cloth.

  4. Tie the cloth over the mold.

Boil

  1. Boil the pudding for 13 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

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

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

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help give the cooked pudding its set structure.
Flour
Provides starch that gives the pudding body and holds its shape when steamed.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Soak up liquid and add bulk, giving the pudding a soft, light texture.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the pudding brown slightly as it cooks.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy fruit pieces throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth over the mold. The cloth must be snug and well floured so water cannot seep into the pudding during the long boil. Water entering the mold would make the pudding soggy and heavy.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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