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Dessert

Christmas Pudding

A boiled pudding made with raisins, currants, suet, sugar, flour, bread crumbs, eggs, milk, and spices, flavored with rum or brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Christmas Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit and suet

  1. Stone the raisins and wash the currants thoroughly.

  2. Chop the beef suet as fine as possible.

Mix the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, combine the raisins, currants, chopped suet, sugar, flour, bread crumbs, and eggs.

  2. Pour the milk over the mixture and mix until well incorporated.

  3. Add the spirit and stir the mixture for a few minutes.

Boil the pudding

  1. Tie the mixture in a well-floured pudding cloth.

  2. Plunge it into boiling water and boil for 4 to 5 hours.

  3. The day before serving, boil for an additional 2 to 3 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. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  3. Currant + rumtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together155 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help give the cooked pudding its set structure.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and add body, giving the pudding a soft, cake-like texture.
Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Flour
Adds structure, helping the mixture hold together during long boiling.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy moisture to the pudding.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and molasses flavour, and helps keep the pudding moist.

The step that matters

Boiling for the full time. The pudding is cooked entirely by long boiling in a cloth, so it must be kept at a steady boil for the full 4 to 5 hours. Too short a boil leaves the centre dense and underset, and the extra boil before serving helps the flavours mature and the texture firm up.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, beef, sugar, flour, bread, egg, rum. 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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