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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A baked pudding made with milk, eggs, raisins, currants, and buttered bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Beat the eggs and add them to the milk along with the fruit.

  2. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish.

  3. Cover the top with slices of buttered bread, dipping the bread in the milk first.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until the bread is brown.

  2. Serve cold, optionally flavored with lemon or vanilla.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard so the milk mixture firms up as it bakes.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and moistens the bread.
Seeded raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Currants
Add small bursts of tart, concentrated fruit flavor and chewiness.
Butter
Browns the bread on top and adds richness to the crust.

The step that matters

Bake until the bread is brown. Browning on top comes from heat reacting with sugars and proteins in the bread and butter. Stop too early and the custard may stay loose; baking too long can dry it out.

Swap the currant

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

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

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