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Dessert

Plum Pudding Without Eggs

A pudding of grated bread, suet, currants and brandy, bound with milk and made without eggs.

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 ↓

Plum Pudding Without Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the grated bread, minced suet, flour, currants, brown sugar, and brandy in a bowl.

  2. Add enough milk to form a stiff batter.

Cook

  1. Place the mixture in a cloth and boil for 4 hours.

  2. Alternatively, bake the pudding.

  3. Add the stoned raisins and candied orange and lemon peel before baking.

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. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Brandy + raisintop 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

Grated bread
Soaks up liquid and gives the pudding its body and structure.
Minced suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Flour
Helps thicken the batter so it holds together when cooked.
Currants
Add sweetness, chewiness and moisture to the pudding.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, caramel-like flavour.
Stoned raisins
Add sweetness and moist, chewy pieces throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Forming the stiff batter. Add milk gradually until the mixture is stiff. Too much liquid makes the pudding slack and heavy, while the bread and flour need enough moisture to soften and set into a cohesive mass during cooking.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, currant, sugar, brandy, milk, raisin. 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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