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Dessert

A Family Plum Pudding

A plum pudding made with eggs, suet, flour, currants, spices, and optional wine or brandy, boiled for six hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

A Family Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the eggs, separating the whites and yolks.

  2. Mix the yolks with ginger, nutmeg, lemon peel, salt, sugar, currants, flour, and suet.

Combine and boil

  1. Thoroughly combine with the beaten egg whites.

  2. If desired, add wine or brandy.

  3. Tie the mixture in a cloth and boil for 6 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with a good pudding 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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whites add lift and a light texture, while yolks add richness and help bind the batter.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together as it steams.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender during long boiling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the pudding its browned, rich flavour.
Currants
Add concentrated fruit sweetness and chewy pockets throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the mixture in a cloth and boil for 6 hours. The cloth must be tied firmly so the pudding keeps its shape and does not take in too much water. Boiling must be steady over the full time so the centre cooks through and the texture sets evenly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, ginger, nutmeg, lemon, sugar, flour, wine):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, ginger, nutmeg, lemon, sugar, flour, wine. 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

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