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Plum Pudding Mould

A custard made with milk, sugar, eggs, lemon rind, and bitter almonds, lined with plum pudding slices and boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,655 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Plum Pudding Mould

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk gently with salt and bruised almonds for 5 minutes.

  2. Add sugar and lemon rind.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Mix in the well-beaten eggs.

Mould and cook

  1. Line a 1-pint mould with thin slices of plum pudding.

  2. Pour the warm mixture into the mould.

  3. Boil gently for 1 hour.

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. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,800 recipes

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

  4. Almond + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard as they cook, giving it body and holding it together.
Milk
Forms the liquid base, adding moisture and richness to the custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavour of the milk and eggs.
Lemon rind
Adds a fresh citrus aroma to the custard.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 1 hour. Eggs set by gentle heat. If the water boils hard, the custard can puff, crack or turn spongy and porous instead of smooth and firm.

Swap the almond

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, lemon, egg):

  1. Milletfits about as well
  2. Almondthe original
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Walnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, lemon, egg. 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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