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Dessert

Old English Plum Pudding

A boiled pudding made with suet, bread crumbs, sugar, flour, raisins, currants, candied peel, milk, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Old English Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix

  1. Rub the dry bread through a colander and weigh it.

  2. Mix the suet, bread crumbs, and sugar together.

  3. Add the flour, raisins, currants, and finely shredded candied peel.

  4. Beat the eggs and mix them with the milk, then add to the mixture.

Boil

  1. Fill several small basins. Tie cloths over the tops.

  2. Boil in a wash-boiler for 10 hours.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Raisin + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,684 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

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich in texture.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and give the pudding its body.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set as it cooks, holding the pudding together.
Flour
Adds structure, thickening the batter as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the fruit and suet.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boiling for 10 hours. The long, steady boil cooks the eggs and flour all the way through, so the pudding sets firm and holds together. A boil that drops too low can leave the centre under-set and heavy.

Swap the currant

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

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

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