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Dessert

Christmas Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with stale bread crumbs, suet, dried fruit, candied peel, almonds, eggs, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 mixture

  1. Rub stale bread through a wire sieve to obtain ¾ pound of crumbs.

  2. In a bowl, combine bread crumbs, flour, and salt.

  3. Add suet, raisins, currants, candied peel, almonds, and sugar; mix thoroughly.

  4. Whisk eggs in a separate bowl, then stir into the pudding mixture.

  5. Add brandy and a little milk if needed, ensuring the mixture is barely moistened.

Boil and cool

  1. Prepare a new stout pudding cloth by boiling it in water, then wring it dry and flour it.

  2. Place the pudding mixture in the cloth, tie securely, leaving room for expansion.

  3. Plunge the pudding into boiling water and boil for 8 hours, ensuring water remains boiling.

  4. After boiling, hang the pudding in the cloth to cool.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  4. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread crumbs
Provide the structure and body that hold the pudding together.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks.
Muscatel raisins
Add sweetness, chew and moisture to the pudding.
All-purpose flour
Helps thicken and bind the crumbs and eggs into a firm mass.

The step that matters

Keeping the water boiling for the full 8 hours. If the water drops below a boil, the pudding cooks unevenly and can turn heavy and soggy. Steady boiling keeps the heat constant so the eggs and starches set evenly throughout.

Swap the currant

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

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

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