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Dessert

English Plum Pudding

A steamed or boiled pudding made with milk, stale bread, flour, sugar, suet, currants, raisins, spices, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin 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

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, stir in the sweet milk gradually with the grated or chopped stale bread.

  2. Add the flour, sugar, chopped beef suet, currants, and stoned raisins, mixing well.

  3. Incorporate the grated nutmegs, mace, cinnamon or cloves, brandy, and salt.

  4. Finally, add another ½ cup of sweet milk and mix thoroughly.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into bowls or molds and boil for 5 hours.

  2. Serve with a sauce made of drawn butter, wine, sugar, and nutmeg.

  3. To use later, boil for 1 hour before serving.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Soaked in milk, it softens and binds the batter into a moist, tender crumb.
Flour
Provides the starch that sets during boiling, giving the pudding its body and structure.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the pudding its dark, caramel-like flavour.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavour that deepens the richness of the dried fruit.
Raisins
Add sweetness, chewy texture and concentrated fruit flavour throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boiling the pudding for the full time. Boiling slowly and steadily for the whole time lets the flour starch gelatinise and the suet melt, setting the pudding evenly. Undercooking leaves it wet and heavy in the centre.

Swap the currant

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

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

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