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Dessert

Plum Pudding, Another Way

A boiled plum pudding made with flour, sugar, eggs, butter, raisins, spices, candied peel, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Plum Pudding, Another Way

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. In a basin, combine the flour and powdered sugar.

  2. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.

  3. Gently stir in the melted butter and beat until well combined.

  4. Mix in the raisins, spices, candied peel, and salt until evenly distributed.

Boil

  1. Transfer the mixture to a suitable basin or mold.

  2. Boil for 6 hours, ensuring the water is boiling when the pudding is added.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 batter and add structure as they set during cooking.
Flour
Forms the structure of the pudding as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the pudding.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Keep the water boiling when the pudding goes in. Adding the pudding to water that is not yet boiling slows the start of cooking and can make the pudding heavy. A steady boil from the start helps it cook evenly over the long steam time.

“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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