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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A boiled pudding made with suet, flour, breadcrumbs, dried fruit, spices, eggs, lemon, sugar, brandy, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 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 ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, mix the suet, flour, breadcrumbs, raisins, currants, sultanas, orange peel, lemon peel, citron peel, sweet almonds, bitter almonds, mixed spice, and ginger.

  2. Add the eggs, lemon juice, lemon rind, sugar, brandy, and a little salt. Mix thoroughly.

  3. If needed, add milk to moisten the mixture.

Shape and boil

  1. Shape the mixture into three good-sized puddings.

  2. Boil the puddings for 6 to 7 hours, then store them in a dry place.

  3. Before serving, boil the puddings for an additional 8 to 10 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. 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. Orange + gingertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich during long boiling.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and give it structure as they set with heat.
All-purpose flour
Provides starch that gives the pudding body and holds its shape.
Breadcrumbs
Soak up liquid and add a soft, tender texture to the mixture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to the pudding's rich, dark color through browning.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavor while helping preserve the pudding.

The step that matters

Long boiling times. The puddings need a full, continuous boil for the stated hours so the eggs and starch set through and the dried fruit softens. Letting the water drop below a simmer can leave the centre dense or undercooked.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

More plum pudding recipes

English 165Christmas 156Sauce 71Eggless 34Baked 33Vegetable 19 See all 649 →

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