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Dessert

Spiced Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with molasses, suet, spices, dried fruit, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg 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 ↓

Spiced Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the batter

  1. Mix molasses and baking soda in a bowl.

  2. Add suet (or butter), milk, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, raisins, currants, salt, and flour.

  3. Stir until combined.

Steam

  1. Place the mixture in a cloth bag, leaving room for expansion.

  2. Boil the bag in water for three hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with 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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Molasses
Adds sweetness, moisture and dark color, and reacts with the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic molasses to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together.
Milk
Hydrates the flour and loosens the batter into a workable mixture.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Leaving room in the cloth bag. The batter rises and expands as it steams, so packing it tightly can burst the bag or make the pudding dense. Leaving space allows the gas from the baking soda to lift the mixture.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (molasses, butter, milk, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, raisin):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against molasses, butter, milk, clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, raisin. 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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