plum duff

1 9.9

A steamed or boiled sweet pudding made with dried fruit like raisins and currants

noun
/plʌm dʌf/

Archaic

: pudín de ciruelas

During the holiday feast, Grandma made her special plum duff filled with juicy raisins.

Examples

Now... You look at the banqueting brochures... and I'll look at plum-duff.

Damage (2009)
For dessert, we enjoyed a warm serving of plum duff topped with custard.
One had seen a man selling hot plum duff, but he was a regular, and when the police met the man in the early evening, he could tell them nothing further.

Fiction book (1990)
Brown Windsor soup, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding plum duff and custard.

White Mischief (1987)
At the country fair, I couldn't resist tasting a slice of homemade plum duff fresh out of the steamer.

Synonyms

duff

vsplum duff

Archaic

4 9.9

A steamed or boiled pudding with dried fruit like raisins

focuses on a traditional recipe often highlighting citron rather than flour texture

plum pudding

vsplum duff

3 5.5

A rich steamed dessert with dried fruit and spices, often served at Christmas in Britain

focuses on flour and dried fruit often with citron rather than added suet

steamed pudding

vsplum duff

2.8

A sweet or savory dish cooked by steaming, often made from flour and eggs

refers to the traditional sweet fruit recipe rather than a general steamed dish

Surface Forms

plum duff singular

plum duffs plural

Morphology

plum + duff

The compound meaning is directly derivable from 'plum' (the fruit) plus 'duff' (a steamed/boiled pudding): it denotes a pudding made with plums or dried fruit. Even if 'duff' is somewhat regional or archaic, a B1 learner who knows both constituent meanings can transparently infer the MWE's meaning from the standard noun+noun composition.

Etymology

Plum duff comes from an old cooking picture: plum once meant dried fruit like 'raisins', and duff was a word for a boiled 'pudding' sailors often made on ships. So plum duff today means the rich steamed or boiled pudding filled with dried fruit.