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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with stale bread crumbs, suet, sugar, spices, fruit, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,536 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in hot milk; let cool.

  2. Add brown sugar, salt, and beaten eggs to the cooled mixture.

Mix and steam

  1. Sift flour with spices, then add suet and fruit; mix well.

  2. Combine this mixture with the first mixture.

  3. Turn into a greased mold, cover tightly, and steam for 6 hours.

  4. On the day of serving, re-steam in the mold for 2 hours or longer.

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 + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Allspice + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,359 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Stale bread crumbs
Soaked in milk, they absorb liquid and give the pudding a moist, tender body.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help set the pudding as it steams.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dense pudding together.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist during long steaming.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and molasses flavor with some moisture.
Raisins
Add chewy sweetness and concentrated fruit flavor throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding. The pudding needs a long, gentle steam with the mold tightly covered so it cooks through evenly and stays moist. Steaming too hard or letting water boil into the mold can make it soggy or uneven.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon, bread, allspice, 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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