Skip to main content
Dessert

A Barford Plum Pudding

A traditional plum pudding made with suet, raisins, flour, sugar, eggs, salt, and nutmeg, boiled for five hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

A Barford Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the suet, raisins, flour, sugar, eggs, salt, and grated nutmeg in a large bowl.

  2. Tie the mixture in a well-floured cloth.

  3. Boil the pudding for 5 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help give the pudding its set structure.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together while it cooks.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the mixture in a well-floured cloth. The floured cloth stops the pudding from sticking to it during the long boil. The cloth must be wrapped firmly enough to hold the shape, yet loosely enough for the pudding to swell as it cooks.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Jalapenofits about as well
  4. Capersfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, flour, sugar, 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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes