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Dessert

Suet Plum Pudding

A suet-based plum pudding made with flour, raisins, suet, sugar, allspice, salt, and sweet milk, boiled in a cloth bag.

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

Suet Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. In a large bowl, mix the flour, suet, raisins, sugar, allspice, and salt.

  2. Add sweet milk gradually until the mixture is wet enough to drop from a spoon.

  3. Transfer the mixture into a cloth bag and tie it securely.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the bag in water for 3 hours.

  2. To serve, heat sugar and water until it forms a clear syrup, then flavor with brandy, vanilla, or lemon.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,475 recipes

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

  3. Flour + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,302 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and gives it a rich texture.
Seeded raisins
Supply concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Sweet milk
Hydrates the flour so the mixture binds into a soft, droppable batter.

The step that matters

Adding the sweet milk. Milk should be added gradually because flour absorbs liquid unevenly. Too much at once makes the mixture slack and hard to shape, while too little leaves the pudding dry and crumbly.

Swap the allspice

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Jalapenofits better
  4. Allspicethe original

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