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Baked Plum Pudding

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Baked Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Chop the suet finely and sprinkle with a little flour to prevent sticking.

  2. In a bowl, mix the flour and baking powder.

  3. Add the chopped suet and rub it into the flour with your hands.

  4. Stone the raisins.

  5. Wash and dry the currants, then pick them over for stones.

  6. Cut the candied peel into small pieces.

  7. Add the raisins, currants, and candied peel to the flour mixture.

  8. Stir in the moist sugar and mixed spice.

  9. Beat the egg with the milk in a cup.

  10. Pour the egg and milk mixture into the bowl and mix until a stiff paste forms.

  11. If needed, add more milk until the mixture is thick enough for a spoon to stand in it.

  12. Grease a pint tin or dish with clarified dripping.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, raisin, sugar, milk, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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