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Dessert

Excellent Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, flour, currants, raisins, eggs, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Excellent Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, mix together the suet, flour, currants, raisins, and beaten eggs.

  2. Add warm milk gradually until the mixture forms a paste.

  3. Transfer the mixture into a cloth or basin.

Cook

  1. Boil for at least 6 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. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Bind the dry ingredients and add richness and structure as they set.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and structure that hold the pudding together.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Currants
Supply sweetness, fruity flavor and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Stoned raisins
Add sweetness, moisture and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Adding the warm milk gradually. Flour hydrates unevenly, so adding milk slowly lets you reach a paste that is moist but not sticky or runny. Too much liquid at once makes the mixture loose and dense, while too little leaves dry pockets of flour.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, raisin, egg, milk. 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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