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Dessert

Plain Plum Pudding

A steamed plum pudding made with flour, breadcrumbs, sugar, currants, plums, suet, candied peel, eggs, milk, baking powder, and optional spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 18,623 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Plain Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil water in a large saucepan.

  2. Grease pudding basins thoroughly with cold dripping.

Make and cook the pudding

  1. Mix all dry ingredients in one bowl and all moist ingredients in another.

  2. Combine the dry and moist mixtures until well blended.

  3. Pour the mixture into the prepared basins.

  4. Cover the basins and boil for 2 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 + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Currant + plumtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together255 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Plum + milktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together406 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the pudding batter.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding a soft, tender body.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the pudding rise and lighten.

The step that matters

Covering and boiling the basins. The basins must stay covered and the water must keep boiling steadily for the full time. This gently steams the pudding through, so it cooks evenly and stays moist rather than drying out or turning heavy.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, bread, sugar, currant, plum, egg, milk):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Allspicefits less well
  4. Clovefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, bread, sugar, currant, plum, 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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