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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed dessert made with raisins, currants, suet, sugar, spices, eggs, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Stone and chop the raisins, leaving some whole.

  2. Combine all ingredients in a large bowl.

  3. Let the mixture sit until the day you plan to steam it.

Steam and serve

  1. On steaming day, add cream or milk, eggs, and salt.

  2. Pack the mixture into a dish or crock.

  3. Cover with a greased or floured cloth.

  4. Steam for 8 hours.

  5. Serve with 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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Orange + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,987 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Raisins
Provide sweetness and chewy body, bulking out the pudding's fruit texture.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Fine bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding a soft, sliceable structure.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and help it set during steaming.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Steaming for the full 8 hours. Steaming gently and for a long time cooks the eggs and starches through and softens the suet and crumbs into a moist, cohesive pudding. Stopping early leaves it dense or underset.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, lemon, sugar, almond, orange, bread, clove. 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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