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Dessert

Baked Plum Pudding

A baked pudding made from stale bread, milk, currants, raisins, citron, spices, eggs, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Baked Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Prepare ingredients the day before and cover closely.

  2. Boil milk and pour hot over grated bread; cover and let steep for 1 hour.

  3. Mix butter, sugar, spices, and citron into the bread mixture after it has steeped.

Make the pudding

  1. Add white wine and gradually stir in beaten eggs when the mixture is cool.

  2. Dredge raisins and currants in flour, then fold into mixture.

  3. Stir mixture well and pour into buttered dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 2 hours.

  2. Serve warm with wine sauce or a mixture of wine and sugar.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  5. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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 set into a tender, custard-like structure when baked.
Bread
Absorbs the hot milk and forms the body of the pudding.
Milk
Soaks into the bread and adds moisture and softness to the pudding.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning on the surface.
Currants and raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Add the eggs when the mixture is cool. Eggs stirred into very hot mixture can scramble unevenly. Cooling first and adding them gradually keeps the batter smooth so the eggs set evenly during baking.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, currant, raisin, nutmeg, cinnamon, sugar):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, currant, raisin, nutmeg, cinnamon, sugar. 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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