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Dessert

Baked Plum Pudding , Without Suet

A baked plum pudding made with milk, bread crumbs, butter, raisins, currants, sugar, candied orange, lemon rind, salt, nutmeg, brandy, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Baked Plum Pudding , Without Suet

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Pour boiling milk over bread crumbs and mix in butter while warm, then let cool.

  2. Once cool, beat until smooth.

  3. Gradually add raisins, currants, sugar, candied orange, lemon rind, salt, nutmeg, and brandy.

  4. Beat in eggs until well combined.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour into a buttered mold and bake for 1.5 hours.

  2. Turn out and serve dusted with sugar, with cream, custard, or sauce.

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

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

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  5. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and help set the pudding as it bakes.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and form the soft, cake-like body of the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender texture to the crumb.
Raisins
Provide chewy pockets of sweetness throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds browning at the surface.

The step that matters

Beat in eggs until well combined. Eggs must be fully blended into the batter so they set evenly; uneven mixing can leave pockets of unset egg or a streaky texture after baking.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, butter, raisin, sugar, orange, lemon. 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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