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Dessert

Children’s Plum Pudding

A sweet pudding made with flour, bread crumbs, currants, suet, moist sugar, lemon peel, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Children’s Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare all the ingredients.

Mix and boil

  1. Mix the ingredients with a little milk until combined.

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

  3. Boil for three 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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Provides the starch and structure that hold the pudding together as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Add body and absorb moisture, giving the pudding a soft, light crumb.
Currants
Add chewy fruitiness and sweetness throughout the pudding.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, plus a deeper flavor from its molasses content.

The step that matters

Boil for three hours. A long, steady simmer cooks the dense mixture through and sets it firmly. Boiling too hard or letting the water level drop can make the pudding uneven or cause the cloth or mold to leak.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, bread, sugar, lemon, 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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