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Dessert

Plum Puddings

A traditional plum pudding made with suet, flour, bread crumbs, sugar, mixed peel, raisins, sultanas, currants, almonds, lemons, milk, brandy, and eggs.

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 Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit and nuts

  1. Chop the suet and peel the almonds.

  2. Clean and chop the currants.

  3. Stone the raisins.

  4. Clean the sultanas.

  5. Grate the rind of the lemons. Squeeze the juice.

Mix and fill

  1. Combine all the dry ingredients in a bowl.

  2. Mix well with the eggs, brandy, and milk.

  3. Add the milk gradually to avoid making the mixture too wet.

  4. Transfer the mixture into greased basins.

Cover and boil

  1. Cover with greased paper. Tie a cloth tightly over the top.

  2. Boil for six 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. 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. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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 add structure as they set during cooking.
Beef suet
Adds richness and fat, keeping the pudding moist and tender.
Flour
Forms the main structure of the pudding as it cooks and sets.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and lighten the texture of the dense mixture.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps the fruit flavour develop.
Raisins
Provide concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Add the milk gradually. Adding liquid slowly lets the flour and crumbs absorb it evenly. Too much liquid at once makes the mixture wet and heavy, so the pudding can turn out soggy.

Swap the currant

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

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

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