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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A moist, spiced plum pudding made with flour, currants, raisins, suet, and orange, lemon, citron peel, allspice, sugar, sherry, 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 ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, currants, bread crumbs, raisins, suet, orange peel, lemon peel, citron peel, allspice, and sugar.

  2. Add sherry and milk gradually until the mixture is moist.

Cook

  1. Pour the mixture into well-greased molds.

  2. Boil or steam the molds according to their size.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  3. Orange + allspicetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together727 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Lemon + allspicetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Currant + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,359 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Millennium flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking so the pudding rises and becomes lighter.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich in texture.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and help give the pudding a soft, tender crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning and flavour develop.
Currants
Add fruity sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Adding the sherry and milk. Liquid must be added gradually so the mixture becomes moist but not wet. Too much liquid at once makes the batter loose, and the pudding may cook up dense or soggy.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, bread, raisin, orange, lemon, allspice, sugar. 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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