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Dessert

Plum Podding

A steamed pudding made with flour, suet, raisins, currants, sultanas, sugar, glace cherries, brandy, spices, eggs, mixed peel, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 Podding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix all ingredients together in a large bowl.

  2. Butter a basin and flour the top of the pudding.

  3. Tie a cloth over the basin.

Boil

  1. Boil for about ten hours, splitting the time into five or six hours one day and about four hours another.

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. Currant + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Raisin + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

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

  5. Raisin + brandytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,768 recipes

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

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 pudding together as it steams.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help set the pudding as it cooks.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich during the long cooking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the strong spices and dried fruit.
Stoned raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Sultanas
Add sweetness and soft, chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

The long boil. The pudding must be kept at a steady boil for the full total time, split over two days as written. Stopping early leaves the centre underset and the texture heavy, because the long gentle steaming is what cooks the batter through and softens the suet.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

More plum pudding recipes

English 165Christmas 156Sauce 71Eggless 34Baked 33Vegetable 19 See all 649 →

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