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Dessert

English Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with eggs, suet, bread crumbs, raisins, currants, cherries, spices, and nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 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 ↓

English Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Beat the eggs very light.

  2. Add lemon juice and brown sugar to the eggs.

  3. Incorporate beef suet or butter, bread crumbs, Sultana raisins, flour, seeded raisins, sweet milk, currants, maraschino cherries, citron or orange paste, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and pecans. Mix all ingredients well.

Steam and serve

  1. Transfer the mixture into well-greased quart buckets.

  2. Steam the puddings for three to four hours.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

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

  5. Sugar + raisintop 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add structure as they set during steaming.
Flour
Provides the bulk structure that holds the pudding together.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding a soft, tender body.
Beef suet or butter
Adds fat for richness and a moist, tender texture.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and deepens the flavor.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy moisture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steam the puddings for three to four hours. Steaming must stay gentle and steady so the pudding cooks through and becomes moist without drying out. Letting the water boil dry or the pudding sit out of the water can leave it dense or dry.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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

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