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Dessert

Christmas Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with sour milk, flour, stale bread crumbs, suet, dried fruit, apples, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Christmas Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Dredge the currants, raisins, and citron with a portion of the flour.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, combine the bread crumbs, sour milk, remaining flour, suet, sugar, and dissolved baking soda; mix thoroughly.

  2. Gently fold in the dredged fruit and chopped apples.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased round tin basin and cover with an inverted plate or pie pan.

  2. Place the basin in a steamer over boiling water and steam for 2.5 hours without lifting the lid.

  3. Serve immediately with tart fruit or lemon 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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  5. Apple + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Sour milk or buttermilk
Provides acidity that reacts with the baking soda to lift the pudding.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk to produce gas, helping the pudding rise and turn light.
Beef suet
Adds fat and richness, keeping the pudding moist and tender as it steams.
Bread crumbs
Absorbs liquid and gives the pudding a soft, tender crumb structure.
White flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together as it steams.
Currants, raisins, and citron
Add chewy texture and concentrated fruit sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steam without lifting the lid. Lifting the cover lets steam escape and the temperature drop, which can stall the rise and leave the pudding dense and uneven.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, bread, beef, apple, raisin, sugar. 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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