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Dessert

A Good Xmas Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, bread crumbs, suet, dried fruit, citrus zest, eggs, sugar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 ↓

A Good Xmas Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the fruit and seed the raisins.

  2. Chop the suet finely, peel and grate the apples, and grate the lemon and orange rinds.

  3. Grate the red part of the carrot and chop the almonds.

Mix and cook

  1. In a bowl, combine all ingredients with the flour and mix well.

  2. Beat the eggs and stir them in, then add the salt and baking powder, mixing thoroughly.

  3. Transfer the mixture into a greased pudding mold or a well-floured pudding cloth.

  4. Steam or boil for twelve hours without adding milk or water.

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 + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Carrot + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure as they set during steaming.
Flour
Provides the body that holds the dense pudding together.
Suet
Adds richness and moisture, keeping the pudding tender as it steams.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and lighten the texture of the dense batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fruit flavours stand out.
Baking powder
Releases gas that gives the pudding some lift.

The step that matters

Steam or boil for twelve hours without adding milk or water. Long, gentle steaming cooks the dense mixture through evenly. Adding liquid during cooking would make the pudding soggy and change its texture, so the pot must be kept topped up with boiling water from outside the mold only as needed.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, bread, raisin, almond, apple, carrot, lemon):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Cranberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, bread, raisin, almond, apple, carrot, lemon. 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.

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