Skip to main content
Dessert

Plum Pudding

A boiled pudding made with raisins, currants, suet, and spices, baked in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Mix the batter

  1. Mix together the raisins, currants, suet, sugar, lemon peel, orange peel, citron peel, flour, bread crumbs, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, and salt in a large bowl.

  2. Add the eggs and enough milk to create a thick batter.

Prepare the cloth

  1. Dip a cloth in boiling water.

  2. Sprinkle the cloth with flour.

  3. Place the mixture in the center of the cloth.

  4. Tie the cloth loosely.

Boil

  1. Boil in a pot of water for 4.5 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. Raisin + flourtop 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. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

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

  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

Eggs
Bind the batter together and add structure as they set during cooking.
Suet
Adds richness and moisture, keeping the pudding tender as it cooks.
Flour
Provides the starch that gives the pudding body and holds its shape.
Bread crumbs
Soak up liquid and help give the pudding a soft, cohesive texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the spices and dried fruit.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth loosely. The pudding batter expands as it heats and needs room, so a tight tie can trap pressure and distort the shape. Dusting the cloth with flour first helps create a crust that keeps the pudding from sticking.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, beef, sugar, lemon, orange, flour, 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 →

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes