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Dessert

Virginia Plum

A plum pudding made with flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and plums, boiled for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Virginia Plum

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the yolks and whites of the eggs separately until light.

  2. Stir the sugar into the yolks, then add the beaten whites.

  3. Cream the butter and flour together, then beat in the sugar and egg mixture.

Add the plums and cook

  1. Cut the plums in half, roll them in flour, and add to the pudding along with a little mace.

  2. Boil the pudding for 4 hours.

  3. Serve hot with rice 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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + plumtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together710 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Provide structure and lift through the beaten yolks and whites, giving the pudding its light body.
Flour
Forms the body of the pudding, giving it structure as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender texture to the batter.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps create a tender crumb.
Stoned plums
Add fruit flavour and moisture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Beating the yolks and whites separately. Beating the whites separately and folding them in last keeps air in the batter, which gives the pudding its lightness. Overbeating or deflating the whites makes the pudding dense.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, egg, plum. 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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