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Dessert

Cup Plum Pudding

A sweet pudding made with bread crumbs, flour, milk, sugar, molasses, raisins, currants, citron, suet, eggs, spices, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Cup Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Beat the eggs until light.

  2. Add molasses, milk, suet, bread crumbs, sugar, spices, and dredged fruit.

  3. Mix well and pour into a buttered mold.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for 5 hours.

  2. Serve with both hard and liquid 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. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Molasses + raisintop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,577 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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 help it set firm as it cooks.
All-purpose flour
Provides structure so the pudding holds its shape when turned out.
Fine dry bread crumbs
Add body and soak up liquid so the pudding stays tender rather than soggy.
Powdered suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Molasses
Adds sweetness, dark color, and moisture, with a deep caramel flavor.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic molasses to produce gas that lightens the batter.

The step that matters

Boil for 5 hours. The long, steady boil cooks the dense batter through and sets it. Cutting the time short can leave the centre wet and gummy, so the pudding needs the full duration.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, milk, sugar, molasses, raisin, 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

English 165Christmas 156Sauce 71Eggless 34Baked 33Vegetable 19 See all 649 →

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