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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, suet, bread, raisins, currants, milk, spices, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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

Make the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, suet, grated bread, raisins, currants, sweet milk, baking powder, salt, orange peel, nutmeg, and eggs until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into a mold.

  3. Boil the pudding for three hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with wine sauce or any other nice sauce.

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. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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 add structure as they set during cooking.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the batter, giving the pudding a lighter, risen texture.
Beef suet
Adds fat that enriches the texture and keeps the pudding moist.
Grated bread
Absorbs the milk and helps give the pudding body and a soft crumb.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy moisture to the pudding.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and structure that hold the pudding together.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding for three hours. The pudding must be fully enclosed in its mold and kept at a steady simmer, since the water must not seep in and the long heat is needed to set the eggs and starch through the center.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, beef, bread, raisin, milk, orange. 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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