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Dessert

Plum Puddings

A rich, spiced plum pudding made with suet, flour, dried fruit, spices, eggs, and fortified wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 20 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Plum Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, mix the suet and flour together.

  2. Add the currants, sugar, breadcrumbs, raisins, candied peel, spices, nutmeg, lemon and orange juice and rind, almonds, and salt.

  3. Stir in the eggs, curacao, and enough marsala to moisten the mixture.

  4. Let the mixture sit for a day.

Steam and serve

  1. Transfer to a well-buttered mold, place in a saucepan of water, and boil for 8 hours.

  2. Turn out onto a dish and serve.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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.
Suet
Adds richness and a moist, tender texture as it melts during steaming.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb liquid and add body, helping the pudding hold a soft, moist crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the pudding moist.
Raisins
Add sweetness, chewy texture and moisture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil for 8 hours. The pudding must be kept at a steady simmer in water for the full time, because steaming slowly sets the eggs and cooks the flour and suet through. Letting the water boil dry or drop too low can leave the centre undercooked or the mold scorched.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, milk, beef, flour, sugar, ginger, cinnamon. 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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