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Dessert

Plum Pudding Without Eggs

An eggless plum pudding made with flour, suet, molasses, raisins, currants, and spices, steamed for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Plum Pudding Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, mix flour, baking powder, suet, brown sugar, salt, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, raisins, currants, molasses, and milk until you have a thick batter.

  2. Pour the batter into a greased pudding mold.

  3. Steam for 2 hours.

Make the hard sauce

  1. For the hard sauce, cream together a lump of butter the size of a large egg with 1 cup of sugar, then add a small beaten egg and flavor to taste.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the structure of the batter so the pudding holds its shape when steamed.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking, lifting the batter so the pudding rises and is light.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Molasses
Adds dark color, deep sweetness and moisture to the pudding.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steam for 2 hours. Steaming gently and steadily cooks the batter through without drying it out. If the water boils dry or the steam drops, the pudding can turn heavy or dense in the center.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, raisin, molasses):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, raisin, molasses. 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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