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Dessert

Cheap Plum Pudding

A boiled pudding made with bread crumbs, raisins, suet, flour, molasses, sour milk, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 ↓

Cheap Plum Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix all ingredients well.

  2. Place the mixture in a bag or mold.

  3. Boil for three hours.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Raisin + molassestop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Flour
Provides the starch and gluten structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to release gas, helping the pudding rise and lighten.
Sour milk
Adds moisture and acidity, which activates the baking soda and tenderizes the crumb.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
New orleans molasses
Adds sweetness, moisture and a dark, deep flavor.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil for three hours. Long, steady boiling cooks the dense batter evenly through to the center. Heat slowly sets the starches and proteins, so a pudding cooked too briefly or at too low a heat stays wet and doughy inside.

“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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