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Dessert

Norton Plum Pudding

A sweet pudding made with bread crumbs, milk, butter, eggs, raisins, currants, lemon peel, mace or nutmeg, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Norton Plum Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pour boiling milk over bread crumbs and cover with a plate for 1 hour.

Make and boil the pudding

  1. Stir in butter, beaten eggs, raisins, currants, lemon peel, mace or nutmeg, and sugar.

  2. Boil for 3 hours.

  3. Add a little flour if necessary.

  4. Boil for an additional hour.

  5. Add 1 large spoonful of potato flour for improvement.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Currant + macetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,791 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Soak up the hot milk to form the body of the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and fat for a tender, moist texture.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Currants
Add tart fruitiness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil for 3 hours. Long, steady boiling cooks the eggs and crumb mixture through and sets the pudding. Keeping the water at a gentle, continuous boil matters because the pudding needs sustained heat to firm up evenly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, butter, egg, raisin, currant, lemon):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, butter, egg, raisin, currant, lemon. 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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