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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A boiled plum pudding with suet, sugar, butter, currants, raisins, citron, milk, eggs, spices, and brandy.

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 the fruit

  1. Seed and chop the raisins.

  2. Wash the currants.

  3. Dredge the fruit with flour.

Make the batter

  1. In a bowl, rub together the butter and sugar.

  2. Stir in the beaten yolks of the eggs and the milk.

  3. Add the flour and the whipped egg whites.

  4. Mix in the spices and brandy.

  5. Fold the fruit into the mixture.

Boil and serve

  1. Pack the mixture into greased molds.

  2. Boil for 5 hours.

  3. Once turned out, stick a sprig of holly in the pudding.

  4. Pour brandy over the pudding.

  5. Frost the pudding.

  6. Before serving, ignite the brandy to set it ablaze.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  4. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Bind the batter and add richness and structure, with whipped whites lightening the mixture.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, softening the batter when creamed with sugar.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps create a tender crumb when creamed with butter.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Folding in the fruit after the flour and egg whites. Folding gently keeps the whipped egg whites airy; stirring hard would deflate them and make the pudding dense. Dredging the fruit in flour helps keep it suspended rather than sinking to the bottom.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits about as well
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, butter, currant, raisin, milk, 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

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