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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A baked pudding made with milk, eggs, raisins, currants, and buttered bread slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,180 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, creamy. The science ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the eggs and add them to the milk along with the raisins and currants.

  2. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish.

  3. Dip the buttered bread slices in the milk and cover the top of the pudding with them.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until the bread is brown.

  2. Serve cold, optionally flavored with lemon or vanilla.

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

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

  2. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard so the pudding firms up when baked and cooled.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the eggs set into a soft custard.
Seeded raisins
Add chewy sweetness and moisture throughout the pudding.
Currants
Add tart, concentrated fruit flavor and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Bread
Soaks up the custard on top and browns in the oven for a crisp finish.

The step that matters

Bake until the bread is brown. The top must be browned for flavor and texture, but over-baking dries the custard. Browning comes from the bread's sugars and proteins reacting under dry heat, so watch the color rather than the clock.

Swap the currant

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

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

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