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Dessert

English Plum Pudding

A boiled pudding made with suet, flour, currants, raisins, citron, orange peel, spices, and sweetened with sugar and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 ↓

English Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the suet, flour, currants, raisins, citron, sugar, brandy, wine, eggs, mace, cloves, grated nutmeg, salt, orange peel, and ginger syrup or peach syrup until well combined.

  2. Divide the mixture into small pudding cloths, each holding about 1 quart.

Boil and store

  1. Boil the puddings in a large pot for 5 hours, ensuring they do not stop boiling.

  2. After boiling, hang the puddings in a cool, dry place to store.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, plunge the pudding into boiling water and boil for 1 hour.

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 + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Brandy + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,427 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Currant + macetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,791 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help give it a set, sturdy texture.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy fruit texture throughout the pudding.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy fruit texture throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown slightly as it cooks.

The step that matters

Keep the puddings boiling for the full 5 hours. If the water stops boiling, the pudding cooks unevenly and can turn heavy or soggy. Steady heat sets the eggs and flour through the dense mixture.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, currant, raisin, sugar, brandy, wine, egg. 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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