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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A sweet bread pudding made with grated bread, milk, flour, butter, sugar, spices, dried fruit, and brandy, boiled for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grate the bread and moisten it with milk.

  2. Add flour, butter, brown sugar, baking soda, raisins, currants, citron, brandy, nutmeg, cinnamon, and allspice. Mix well and tie the mixture in a cloth.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil for 5 hours.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Bread + wheattop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 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

Baker's bread
Soaked in milk, it forms the soft crumb that gives the pudding its body.
Wheat flour
Adds starch that helps bind the mixture and firm it as it cooks.
Butter
Contributes fat for richness and a tender, moist texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with acidic ingredients to lighten the pudding and help it rise slightly.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and molasses flavour, and moisture to the mixture.
Raisins
Provide concentrated sweetness and chewy fruit texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth. The cloth must be tied loosely enough to leave room for the pudding to swell as it cooks. If it is tied too tightly, the pudding can be squeezed and become dense, and if the cloth is not sealed well, water can seep in during the long boil.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, wheat, flour, butter, sugar, raisin):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, wheat, flour, butter, sugar, raisin. 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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