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Dessert

English Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, dried fruit, spices, flour, and eggs, served with brandy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 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 ↓

English Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the stale bread overnight in milk or water.

  2. In a large bowl, mix the soaked bread with raisins, currants, suet, mixed peel, nutmeg, eggs, brown sugar, brandy, flour, cinnamon, cloves, almonds, and salt until well combined.

Steam and serve

  1. Grease a large bowl and fill it with the mixture, then tie a clean cloth tightly over the top.

  2. Place the bowl in a kettle of boiling water and boil for 10 to 14 hours.

  3. To serve, turn the pudding onto a plate with a bowl still covering it, heat through, and serve with brandy 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. Currant + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help give the pudding its set structure.
Stale bread
Soaked bread adds moisture and body to the dense fruit mixture.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich in texture.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deep molasses flavour.
Flour
Gives the mixture structure so it holds together when steamed.

The step that matters

Boiling the pudding. The bowl must stay submerged in steadily boiling water for the whole 10 to 14 hours. If the water level drops or the boil weakens, the pudding cooks unevenly and can turn out dense or underdone.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Datesfits about as well
  4. Currantthe original

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