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Dessert

Plum Pudding Without Eggs

A moist plum pudding made with bread, suet, treacle or sugar, honey-water, currants, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Honey and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,336 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

Plum Pudding Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Mix

  1. Mix the bread, suet, treacle or sugar, honey-water, and currants in a bowl.

  2. Add a little milk to achieve a moist consistency.

Cook

  1. Transfer the mixture to a pudding cloth or mold.

  2. Boil for 3 to 4 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. Honey + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Bread + honeytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  4. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Soaks up liquid and gives the pudding its body and crumb.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Treacle or sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the pudding moist and deeply flavoured.
Currants
Add sweetness, chewy texture and fruity flavour throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Adjusting the milk. Bread and suet soak up liquid. Too little milk leaves the mixture crumbly and dry, while too much makes the pudding heavy and slack once boiled.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sugar, honey, milk):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, honey, 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.

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