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Dessert

Plum Pudding in the English Way

A steamed pudding made with suet, flour, sugar, dried fruit, spices, eggs, milk, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Plum Pudding in the English Way

Ingredients

Directions

Mix the batter

  1. In a large bowl, mix the suet and flour together well.

  2. Add the sugar and mix thoroughly.

  3. In a separate bowl, combine the raisins, currants, lemon juice, lemon zest, almonds, orange peel, citron, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, and coriander seed.

  4. Add the fruit mixture to the flour mixture and combine well.

  5. Stir in the beaten eggs, milk, and brandy until fully mixed.

Mould and boil

  1. Prepare a buttered mold that can hold the mixture and pour the pudding batter into it.

  2. Cover the mold with a buttered and floured cloth, securing it tightly.

  3. Boil the pudding for 7 to 8 hours.

Serve

  1. Once cooked, turn it out onto a serving dish.

  2. If serving at Christmas, pour brandy over the pudding and ignite it before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  4. Almond + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and help give the cooked pudding its set structure.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch and structure that hold the dense pudding together.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich during long steaming.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps to deepen the flavour of the fruit.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness, chewy texture and moisture to the pudding.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavour, and is used again to flame the pudding.

The step that matters

Securing the cloth over the mold. A tightly secured, floured cloth lets the pudding expand and steam evenly over a long boil, while keeping water out of the batter.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, raisin, lemon, almond, orange, nutmeg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, raisin, lemon, almond, orange, nutmeg. 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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