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Dessert

A Simple Plum Pudding

A fruit pudding made with bread crumbs, raisins, currants, butter, flour, sugar, spices, and eggs, boiled for three hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

A Simple Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Pour boiling milk over bread crumbs and let cool thoroughly.

  2. Add raisins, currants, butter mixed with flour, sugar, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and beaten eggs.

  3. Flour the fruit before mixing.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil the mixture for three hours.

  2. Serve with hot brandy 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Raisin + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

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

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 set it into a firm, sliceable body when heated.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and form the soft, moist body of the pudding.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture to the pudding.
Currants
Add tart, chewy fruit flavor and texture throughout the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender, smooth mouthfeel to the pudding.
Flour
Coats the fruit and helps it stay suspended evenly instead of sinking.

The step that matters

Flour the fruit before mixing.. Dusting raisins and currants with flour creates a light coating that helps them grip the batter. This keeps the fruit spread evenly through the pudding rather than sinking to the bottom during boiling.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, raisin, butter, flour, sugar, clove. 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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