plum duff
1
9.9
- noun
- /plʌm dʌf/
- Archaic
- 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.
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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.
-
At the country fair, I couldn't resist tasting a slice of homemade plum duff fresh out of the steamer.
Synonyms
4
5.5
A rich steamed dessert with dried fruit and spices, often served at Christmas in Britain
1
9.9
A steamed or boiled pudding with dried fruit like raisins
1
2.8
A sweet or savory dish cooked by steaming, often made from flour and eggs
Surface Forms
Morphology
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.