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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with raisins, currants, suet, sugar, candied peel, flour, breadcrumbs, nutmeg, eggs, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick and stone the raisins and wash and dry the currants.

  2. Chop the beef suet coarsely and place it in a bowl.

Make the pudding

  1. Add sugar, candied peel, flour, bread crumbs, nutmeg, eggs, and water to the bowl, then mix until you achieve a nice consistency.

  2. Butter a mold.

  3. Cover the mold with a piece of white paper, tying it securely with cloth.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil in plenty of water for four hours.

  2. Remove the cloth and paper.

  3. Turn the pudding out of the mold.

  4. Serve with sweet sauce.

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. 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. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  5. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Beef suet
Provides fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help give the pudding its set structure.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and add body, giving the pudding a soft, cohesive texture.
Flour
Adds structure, helping the pudding hold its shape after boiling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the suet.

The step that matters

Boil in plenty of water for four hours. The pudding must be fully enclosed and surrounded by enough boiling water for the whole time. Too little water or a lapse in boiling lets the temperature drop, leaving the pudding undercooked and dense.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

More plum pudding recipes

English 165Christmas 156Sauce 71Eggless 34Baked 33Vegetable 19 See all 649 →

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