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Dessert

English Plum Pudding

A boiled pudding made with raisins, currants, suet, bread crumbs, sugar, spices, eggs, brandy, and candied orange peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ingredients

  1. Chop the suet finely.

  2. Mince the orange peel.

  3. Clean, wash and dry the currants.

  4. Stone the raisins.

Make the mixture

  1. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl.

  2. Beat the eggs and add the brandy to them.

  3. Pour the egg and brandy mixture over the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly.

Pack and boil

  1. Pack the pudding mixture into well-greased pudding molds.

  2. Boil the pudding for 6 hours immediately after preparing.

  3. Boil the pudding for another 6 hours when ready to serve.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  5. Orange + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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 as it steams.
Stale bread crumbs
Absorb the liquid and give the pudding its body and structure.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and help it set as it cooks.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness.
Currants
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, molasses-like flavor.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding for the full 6 hours before serving. Long, steady steaming cooks the eggs and bread through and sets the dense mixture. Cutting the boil short leaves it soft and under-set in the centre.

Swap the currant

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

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

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