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Dessert

Best Soet Op Plum Pudding

A fruit pudding made with raisins, currants, suet, flour, breadcrumbs, spices, preserved citrus peel, sugar, eggs, milk, and brandy, boiled for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Best Soet Op Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the pudding

  1. Mix the raisins, currants, suet, flour, bread crumbs, fine spice, lemon peel, orange peel, citron, nutmeg, and sugar in a large bowl.

  2. Break in the eggs and stir well.

  3. Add the milk and brandy, mixing until combined.

  4. If the mixture is too dry, add a little more milk until it is stiff enough for a spoon to stand upright.

Cook

  1. Boil the pudding for 4 hours.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  5. Orange + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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 tender texture as it melts during cooking.
Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and help give the pudding a soft, light body.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Adjusting the moisture of the mixture. Too much liquid makes the pudding heavy and wet, while too little leaves it dry and crumbly. Adding milk gradually lets you reach a stiff, spoonable consistency that holds its shape during boiling.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, flour, bread, lemon, orange, nutmeg, 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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