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Dessert

Christmas Pudding

A steamed or boiled dessert made with raisins, currants, sultanas, mixed peel, almonds, flour, suet, eggs, milk, lemon rind, and spices.

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 ↓

Christmas Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grease pudding basins or molds. Sprinkle with caster sugar if desired.

  2. Prepare pudding cloths, strings, and pieces of greased white paper.

  3. Stone the raisins. Wash and dry the currants. Clean the sultanas. Cut the peel into shreds. Blanch and shred the almonds. Make the bread crumbs. Chop the suet finely.

Make the batter

  1. Break the eggs one at a time into a cup. Add them to a basin and beat well, adding a little milk.

  2. In a separate basin, mix the flour with salt, spice, bread crumbs, and lemon rind. Add the suet, sugar, almonds, and fruit to the flour mixture.

  3. Incorporate the eggs to form a loose paste.

  4. Fill the basins to the top. Cover with paper, then with cloth.

Boil and serve

  1. Place the puddings in boiling water. Boil for 6 to 10 hours, depending on size.

  2. Remove the cloth and paper. Turn the pudding onto a hot dish. Sprinkle with caster sugar.

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

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

  3. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  5. Bread + beeftop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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 give the pudding its set structure as they cook.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich during long steaming.
Flour
Provides the starch structure that holds the pudding together.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and lighten the texture of the dense pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps moisten and flavour the pudding.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil for the full time in boiling water. Long, steady steaming cooks the eggs and starch through and sets the dense mixture. Water that stops boiling or runs low lengthens cooking and can leave the pudding heavy or undercooked.

Swap the almond

The recipe marks almond as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, currant, sugar, flour, bread, beef, egg):

  1. Almondthe original
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Pistachiofits less well
  4. Beansfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, currant, sugar, flour, bread, beef, 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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