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Dessert

Plum Pudding

A dessert made with tapioca, plums, sugar, vanilla, and salt, baked and topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 171 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the tapioca

  1. Soak tapioca in cold water overnight.

  2. Cook tapioca in the same water until clear.

Make the plum filling

  1. Heat plums thoroughly.

  2. Add sugar to the plums.

  3. Remove from heat.

  4. Stir in vanilla.

  5. Mix the plums with the cooked tapioca.

Bake and serve

  1. Transfer to a baking dish.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  3. Top with meringue.

  4. Brown delicately.

  5. Serve with whipped cream.

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. Plum + vanillatop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together171 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Tapioca
Thickens the cooked liquid as it becomes clear, giving the pudding a soft, set body.
Blue plums
Provide the main fruit flavour and moisture for the pudding filling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the plums.

The step that matters

Cook tapioca until clear. Tapioca must be cooked fully in the water until it turns clear; undercooked starch stays opaque and firm and will not thicken the filling properly.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vanilla):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Blueberryfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vanilla. 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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