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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A dense, sweet pudding made with flour, breadcrumbs, suet, sugar, raisins, currants, spices, and milk, baked or steamed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl.

  2. Add enough milk to form a very stiff batter.

  3. Turn the mixture into a well-greased basin.

Cook

  1. Boil for 6 hours or steam for at least 7 hours.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dense pudding together as it cooks.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb milk and add body, giving the pudding a soft, tender crumb.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich during long cooking.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and contributes to the deep colour of the pudding.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy fruit texture throughout the pudding.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the batter so the pudding is not wholly dense.

The step that matters

Boil for 6 hours or steam for at least 7 hours. Long, steady cooking is needed to fully set the dense batter and cook the centre through. Stopping early leaves the pudding heavy and undercooked, so keep the water at a steady simmer throughout.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, raisin, currant, nutmeg, milk. 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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