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Dessert

Plum Pudding Jelly

A gelatinous dessert made with plum, raisins, currants, citron, chocolate, and orange juice or sweet wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the gelatine in ½ cup of cold water for 30 minutes.

  2. Seed the raisins and clean the currants.

  3. Slice the citron and cover the fruit with orange juice or sweet wine.

Make the jelly

  1. Scald the milk, add the sugar, and stir until dissolved.

  2. Melt the chocolate over hot water and mix it into the scalded milk.

  3. Dissolve the gelatine over hot water, strain it into the milk, and remove from heat.

  4. Let the mixture sit until it begins to thicken, then gently stir in the fruit.

  5. Pour into a mold that has been wet with cold water and refrigerate until hardened.

Serve

  1. Serve with whipped cream.

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

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

  3. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  5. Chocolate + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,128 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the milk mixture into a firm, sliceable jelly as it cools.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid base that the gelatine sets.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and balances the bitterness of the chocolate.
Chocolate or cocoa
Adds flavour and colour to the milk base.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the jelly.

The step that matters

Let the mixture thicken before adding the fruit. Gelatine begins to set as it cools. If the mixture is still very liquid when the fruit is stirred in, the fruit sinks and settles unevenly. If it has thickened too far, the fruit will not mix in smoothly.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, raisin, chocolate, milk, orange. 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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