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Dessert

A Plain Christmas Pudding for Children

A simple Christmas pudding made with flour, breadcrumbs, raisins, currants, suet, eggs, milk, candied peel, allspice, and salt.

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

A Plain Christmas Pudding for Children

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Finely chop the suet.

  2. Stone the raisins.

  3. Wash, pick, and dry the currants.

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the suet, raisins, currants, flour, breadcrumbs, candied peel, allspice, and salt together.

  2. Beat the eggs and strain them into the mixture.

  3. Add enough milk to achieve a proper consistency.

  4. Tie the mixture in a well-floured cloth.

Boil and serve

  1. Place it in boiling water.

  2. Boil for at least 5 hours.

  3. Serve with a sprig of holly on top.

  4. Sprinkle with pounded sugar.

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. Currant + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,359 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

  3. Raisin + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,475 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Flour + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,302 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm when boiled.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together.
Breadcrumbs
Soak up moisture and add body to the dense mixture.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich in texture.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil for at least 5 hours. The pudding must stay submerged in steadily boiling water for the full time. Long, gentle cooking sets the eggs and cooks the dense mixture through, so a shorter or weaker boil leaves it heavy or undercooked.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, raisin, egg, milk, allspice):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, raisin, egg, milk, allspice. 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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