Skip to main content
Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed or baked dessert made with raisins, currants, suet, bread crumbs, spices, liquor, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the fruit and flour well.

  2. Grease molds or pans and dust with fine bread crumbs.

  3. Line pans with greased paper.

Make the pudding

  1. Mix suet, bread crumbs, and enough liquid to make it as moist as fresh bread.

  2. Add sugar, spices, and ¾ pint of your chosen liquor, then mix well.

  3. Incorporate the beaten eggs, followed by the fruit.

Cook and serve

  1. Steam or bake for 8 to 9 hours, or divide and cook for 4 hours.

  2. Make sauce as needed.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  5. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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 add structure and richness as the pudding sets.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist during long cooking.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the liquid and give the pudding body and a soft, moist crumb.
Raisins
Add sweetness, chew and moisture to the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the pudding its dark, rich flavour.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavour, and helps keep the pudding moist.

The step that matters

Cook for the full time. Long, gentle steaming or baking is needed for the suet and eggs to set and the dense mixture to cook through. Cutting the time short leaves the centre raw and wet.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, sugar, bread, lemon, nutmeg, cinnamon, brandy):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, sugar, bread, lemon, nutmeg, cinnamon, brandy. 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 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes