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Dessert

Boiled Plum Pudding

A boiled pudding made with butter, flour, eggs, milk, whisky, raisins, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Boiled Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cream the butter and flour together.

  2. Beat the eggs separately, adding the whites last.

  3. Coat the raisins with flour.

Make the batter

  1. Mix the flour, butter, eggs, milk, and baking soda.

  2. Gently stir in the floured raisins.

  3. Coat a canton flannel bag with flour and pour in the mixture.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the bag in a pot of boiling water, ensuring it doesn't touch the sides.

  2. Boil for six hours and serve with hard butter 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten eggs, with whites added last, give the pudding structure and lift.
Baking soda
Releases gas in the batter, helping the pudding rise and become light.
Butter
Creamed with the flour, it adds richness and a tender texture.
Flour
Forms the body of the pudding and sets as it cooks, giving it structure.
Sweet raisins
Provide sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Securing the bag so it does not touch the pot. If the bag touches the sides of the pot, the pudding can stick or cook unevenly where it contacts the hot metal, so it should hang freely in the boiling water.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Applefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, egg, milk, whisky. 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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