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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with eggs, milk, suet, raisins, currants, sugar, nutmeg, candied peel, flour, brandy, wine, and butter sauce.

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

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the batter

  1. Beat the eggs well in a bowl.

  2. Add ½ cup of new milk and 1 teaspoon of salt to the eggs.

  3. Mix in the chopped beef suet, raisins, currants, brown sugar, grated nutmeg, and candied peel.

  4. Stir well and add another ½ cup of new milk.

  5. Beat in enough flour to make a stiff paste.

  6. Add ⅓ cup of brandy and ⅓ cup of white wine.

Boil the pudding

  1. Tie the mixture in a cloth or place it in a mould.

  2. Boil for 5 hours in a mould or 4 hours in a cloth.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Melt ½ cup of butter.

  2. Mix in the loaf sugar, ⅓ cup of white wine, and ⅓ cup of brandy.

  3. Bring the sauce to a boil.

  4. Pour half of the sauce over the pudding.

  5. Serve the rest in a hot sauceboat.

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. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  3. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Milk + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the batter and help the pudding hold together as it cooks.
Flour
Provides the structure that turns the mixture into a stiff, sliceable pudding.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and tender as it cooks.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, molasses-like flavour to the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and body to the sauce.
Brandy
Adds a strong aroma and warm flavour to both the pudding and the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil for the full time. A dense, heavy mixture needs long, steady heat to cook through to the centre. Letting the water drop below a boil for long stretches can leave the pudding heavy and underdone.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, milk, beef, raisin, sugar, nutmeg, flour. 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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