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Dessert

Egoless Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with raisins, molasses, sweet milk, baking soda, salt, cloves, cinnamon, sugar, butter, lemon rind, and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Egoless Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, combine raisins, molasses, sweet milk, baking soda, salt, cloves, and cinnamon.

  2. Pour the mixture into a 2-quart pudding mold.

  3. Place the mold in a kettle of boiling water or steam for 2.5 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, cream together white sugar and butter.

  2. Add grated lemon rind and egg white, mixing until smooth.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Raisin + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic molasses to produce gas, helping the pudding rise and become light.
Molasses
Adds moisture, dark colour, and deep sweetness, and gives the pudding its dense, rich texture.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.
Sweet milk
Adds moisture and helps the dry ingredients combine into a smooth batter.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, which softens the sauce and carries flavour.
Egg white
Adds lightness and helps the sauce hold together as it is mixed.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding for the full time. Steaming in boiling water for the full 2.5 hours cooks the batter gently and evenly. Without steady, moist heat for the whole time, the pudding can turn out dense or undercooked in the centre.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits about as well
  3. Clovethe original
  4. Allspicefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, molasses, milk, cinnamon, sugar, butter, egg. 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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