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Dessert

Small and Light Plum Pudding

A pudding made from stale bread, suet, raisins, and orange rind, boiled for two hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Small and Light Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Soak the grated stale bread in boiling milk.

  2. Mix in the minced suet, dry bread crumbs, raisins, salt, orange rind, and egg yolks.

  3. Boil the pudding for 2 hours or more.

Serve

  1. Serve with a very sweet 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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Raisin + orangetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

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

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Soaks up the boiling milk to form the soft, body-giving base of the pudding.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Eggs
Egg yolks bind the mixture so it holds together when boiled.
Raisins
Provide chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding for 2 hours or more. Long, steady boiling cooks the starchy bread and egg through and sets the dense mixture. Too short a time leaves it wet and under-set in the centre.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Datesfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, 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.

More plum pudding recipes

English 165Christmas 156Sauce 71Eggless 34Baked 33Vegetable 19 See all 649 →

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