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Dessert

Health Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with graham flour, nuts, raisins, molasses, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Health Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. In a bowl, mix the graham flour, salt, baking soda, and baking powder.

  2. Add the chopped nuts, raisins, molasses, and milk to the dry ingredients and mix well and quickly until combined.

Cook and serve

  1. Butter a pudding mold and pour in the batter.

  2. Boil for three hours.

  3. Serve with lemon sauce.

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. Nuts + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Raisin + molassestop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Flour + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  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

Graham flour
Forms the main structure of the pudding batter.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses and milk to help the pudding rise.
Baking powder
Adds lift so the pudding becomes light rather than dense.
Molasses
Adds moisture, dark color, and a deep sweetness.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and helps form the batter's moist crumb.

The step that matters

Mix well and quickly until combined. Once the liquid meets the flour and leaveners, gas starts forming right away. Overmixing develops gluten and knocks out bubbles, and waiting lets the rising power fade, so the batter should go into the mold promptly.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits about as well
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, raisin, molasses, 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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