Skip to main content
Dessert

Norton Plum Pudding

A sweet pudding made with bread crumbs, milk, butter, eggs, raisins, currants, and spices, cooked slowly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Norton Plum Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Pour boiling milk over bread crumbs and cover for 1 hour.

  2. Stir in butter, beaten eggs, raisins, currants, lemon peel, mace or nutmeg, and sugar.

Boil the pudding

  1. Boil for 3 hours.

  2. If necessary, add a little flour and boil for an additional hour.

  3. For improvement, add a large spoonful of potato flour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Currant + macetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,791 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Soak up the hot milk to form the bulk of the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and a soft, tender texture.
Raisins
Provide sweetness and chewy fruit throughout the pudding.
Currants
Add concentrated fruit flavour and chewy pockets to the pudding.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, butter, egg, raisin, currant, 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.

You might also like

Orange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipes