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Dessert

A Faintly Plum Pudding

A plum pudding made with eggs, suet, flour, currants, sugar, spices, boiled for six hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

A Faintly Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Separate the egg whites and yolks.

  2. Mix the yolks with ginger, nutmeg, lemon peel, salt, sugar, currants, flour, and suet.

Cook and serve

  1. Beat the mixture thoroughly with the egg whites.

  2. Tie the mixture in a cloth and boil for 6 hours.

  3. Serve with a good pudding sauce.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  2. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whites and yolks add structure and richness to the batter as it sets.
Flour
Forms the body of the pudding, giving it structure as it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender during long boiling.
Currants
Provide fruit sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the spices.

The step that matters

Tie the mixture in a cloth and boil for 6 hours. The cloth must be tied firmly but with room for the pudding to expand, and the water must keep simmering for the full time. Uneven heat or a loose cloth can let water in and leave the pudding soggy or crumbly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, ginger, nutmeg, lemon, sugar, flour, wine):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, ginger, nutmeg, lemon, sugar, flour, wine. 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

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