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Dessert

Very Good Plum Pudding

A pudding made from carrots, currants, raisins, suet, flour, treacle, and candied orange peel, boiled for several hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Very Good Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Scrape and boil the carrots until soft.

  2. Mash the carrots to a pulp while warm.

Mix and cook

  1. Mix the mashed carrots with currants, raisins, suet, flour, treacle, and candied orange peel.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a well-buttered basin.

  3. Boil for 4 to 5 hours.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Carrot + orangetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

  4. Raisin + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Provide the bulk and moisture, giving the pudding its soft, pulpy body.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the texture and keeps the pudding moist as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Gives structure so the mixture holds together rather than falling apart when boiled.
Treacle
Adds sweetness and a dark, rich flavour along with extra moisture.
Currants
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy fruitiness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil for 4 to 5 hours. Long, gentle boiling cooks the starch and fat through and sets the dense pudding. Too little time leaves it heavy and doughy, and the basin must stay topped up with water so it does not boil dry.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, raisin, flour, orange):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, raisin, flour, orange. 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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