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Dessert

Simple Plum Pudding

A boiled plum pudding made with suet, currants, raisins, flour, bread crumbs, candied peel, sugar, milk, eggs, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Simple Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine the dry ingredients: suet, currants, raisins, flour, bread crumbs, candied peel, and sugar.

  2. In another bowl, beat the eggs and milk together, then mix into the dry ingredients.

Cook

  1. Transfer the mixture into a cloth or basin and boil for four 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. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the dry ingredients together and add richness and structure to the pudding.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich during long steaming.
Flour
Forms the main structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding a tender, light body.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking to help the pudding rise and lighten.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to browning and flavour.

The step that matters

Transfer the mixture into a cloth or basin and boil for four hours. The pudding must be sealed tightly and kept at a steady boil for the full time. Water that enters or a pot that boils dry can make the pudding soggy or dense, and the long steady cooking is what sets its structure.

Swap the currant

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

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

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