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Dessert

Steamed Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, bread crumbs, flour, spices, sugar, mixed fruit, eggs, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Steamed Plum Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Mix together the suet, bread crumbs, flour, cinnamon, mace, clove, sugar, mixed fruit, and salt.

  2. Beat the eggs.

  3. Add the beaten eggs to the mixture with 2-3 tablespoons of milk. Stir until combined.

  4. If the mixture is too dry, add more milk until it is soft but can be taken up in heaped spoonfuls.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam the mixture in a buttered mold for about 5 hours, replenishing the water with boiling water as it evaporates.

  2. Serve hot with a hard or liquid pudding 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 + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Bread crumbs
Provide body and soak up moisture, giving the pudding its light, tender structure.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm while steaming.
Flour
Adds structure, helping the pudding hold its shape when cooked.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown slightly at the surface.

The step that matters

Adding milk to the batter. Too little milk leaves the batter dry and crumbly, while too much makes it loose and heavy. The batter should be soft yet hold its shape in spoonfuls, so the crumbs can absorb liquid and set evenly during long steaming.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, cinnamon, clove, sugar, raisin, egg. 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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