Skip to main content
Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed plum pudding made with currants, raisins, suet, flour, bread, carrots, potatoes, candied peel, spices, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

  1. Combine currants, sultana raisins, sugar, suet, flour, bread, carrots, potatoes, candied peel, salt, eggs, nutmeg, ginger, and cinnamon in a large bowl. Mix well until all ingredients are combined.

Steam and store

  1. Shape the mixture into a pudding and wrap it in a cloth.

  2. Steam the pudding for 6 hours.

  3. Hang the pudding in the cloth until needed.

Reheat and serve

  1. When ready to serve, boil the pudding again for 1 to 2 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 + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

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

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

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

  5. Flour + carrottop 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

Eggs
Bind the mixture together and help the pudding hold its shape.
Flour
Adds bulk and structure so the pudding holds together after steaming.
Bread
Adds bulk and soaks up moisture, keeping the pudding tender.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown and develop flavor.
Currants
Provide fruit sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding. The pudding must be steamed long enough to cook through and set. Keeping the cloth wrapped and the water simmering maintains steady heat, so the pudding cooks evenly without drying out.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, sugar, flour, bread, carrot, potato, 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 →

You might also like

Soft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesGingerbreadGingerbread25 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipes