Skip to main content
Dessert

Plum Pudding

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the batter

  1. In a large bowl, combine the beef suet, sugar, bread crumbs, raisins, currants, and citron.

  2. Add the sweet milk and eggs, mixing well.

  3. Stir in the cream of tartar and baking soda.

  4. Gradually add flour until you achieve a stiff batter.

Steam the pudding

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased pudding mold.

  2. Steam for 2 hours.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Beef suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it steams.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and give it structure as they set during steaming.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the stiff batter together.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the pudding its rich, dark flavour.
Cream of tartar
Acid that reacts with the baking soda and helps the pudding rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the cream of tartar to release gas that lightens the pudding.

The step that matters

Gradually add flour until the batter is stiff. Flour sets the structure of the pudding. Adding it gradually lets you stop at the right stiffness, since too little flour leaves the pudding loose and too much makes it dense and heavy.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, sugar, bread, raisin, milk, egg, cream. 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 →

You might also like

Bread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipes