Skip to main content
Dessert

Small and Very Light Plum Pudding

A small, light pudding made from stale bread, milk, and suet, boiled for over four hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Small and Very Light Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the grated stale bread in boiling milk.

  2. Mix in the finely chopped suet until well combined.

  3. Adjust the liquid as needed to moisten the mixture.

Cook

  1. Boil the pudding for 4 hours and 15 minutes.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Absorbs the hot milk and gives the pudding its body and structure.
Milk
Softens the grated bread and supplies the moisture that keeps the pudding tender.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the pudding and keeps the crumb soft as it cooks.

The step that matters

Adjust the liquid as needed to moisten the mixture. Stale bread soaks up liquid at different rates depending on its dryness. Too little milk leaves dry, crumbly pockets, while too much makes the pudding heavy and wet. Checking the texture by eye before boiling lets the cook correct the balance.

“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

Bread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesBrown Bread PuddingBrown Bread Pudding47 recipes