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Dessert

An Excellent Plum Pudding

A baked pudding made with flour, suet, dried fruit, candied peel, sugar, eggs, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

An Excellent Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the batter

  1. In a large bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, bread crumbs, suet, raisins, currants, sultanas, sugar, almonds, mixed candied peel, salt, and spices.

  2. Add the beaten eggs and milk to the mixture and combine well.

Cook

  1. Divide the mixture into two portions and place in pudding cloths or molds.

  2. Boil for 8 hours in a large pot of water.

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

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

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture together and add structure as they set during cooking.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the pudding rise and lighten.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding a soft, tender body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the dried fruit taste rich.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil for 8 hours in a large pot of water.. The pudding must stay fully submerged and at a steady boil for the whole time. Water that drops below a simmer slows the cooking and can leave the center heavy and underdone.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, bread, raisin, sugar, almond, egg, 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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