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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed plum pudding made with raisins, currants, suet, eggs, sugar, baking soda, nutmeg, salt, milk, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine raisins, currants, chopped suet, eggs, sugar, baking soda, nutmeg, and salt in a large bowl.

  2. Moisten the mixture with milk and add flour until the mixture is soft.

  3. Tie the mixture in a cloth bag, leaving room for it to swell.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the bag in water for 3 to 4 hours.

  2. Serve with 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. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Raisins
Provide sweetness, chewy texture and body to the pudding.
Currants
Add concentrated fruit flavour and a chewy, tender texture.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help give it structure as it cooks.
Baking soda
Reacts to lighten the mixture and help it rise slightly.
Flour
Gives the mixture structure so it holds together when boiled.

The step that matters

Leave room in the cloth bag. The pudding swells as it cooks, so the bag must have space to expand. Tying it too tightly can trap pressure and burst the bag or leave the pudding dense.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, egg, sugar, nutmeg, milk, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, egg, sugar, nutmeg, milk, flour. 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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