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Dessert

Linked Plum Pudding

A dense, sweet pudding made with suet, flour, raisins, currants, candied peel, and baked in a dripping tin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Linked Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the mixture

  1. In a bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, and salt.

  2. Add the chopped suet, raisins, currants, sugar, and candied peel.

  3. In a cup, beat the egg with the milk and remove any speck.

  4. Moisten the mixture with the egg and milk, adding more milk if necessary until very stiff.

Bake and serve

  1. Grease a dripping tin with dripping and pour in the mixture.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for about 1 hour.

  3. Cut into squares, sift sugar over it, and serve.

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. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  3. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

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

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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dense, stiff pudding together.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Baking powder
Releases gas that helps the pudding rise and lighten.
Egg
Binds the mixture and adds structure as it sets in the oven.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps brown the outside of the pudding.
Raisins
Add sweetness, chewy texture, and moisture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Moistening the mixture until very stiff. Too much liquid makes the pudding heavy and gummy, while too little leaves it dry and crumbly. Add milk gradually and stop once the dough is stiff, since the flour absorbs liquid and the batter firms as it stands.

Swap the currant

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

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

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