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Vegetable Pudding

A boiled pudding made with carrots, mashed potatoes, flour, suet, sugar, candied lemon peel, and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and potato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,107 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Vegetable Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the carrots until tender.

  2. In a large bowl, combine the carrots, cold mashed potatoes, flour, suet, sugar, candied lemon peel, and currants, and mix well until all ingredients are combined.

Cook and serve

  1. Transfer the mixture to a pudding mold.

  2. Boil slowly for 2 hours.

  3. Serve warm.

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. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Carrot + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Potato + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Provide moisture and sweetness, forming the body of the pudding.
Cold mashed potatoes
Add starch and bulk, helping the pudding hold together and stay moist.
Flour
Provides structure, binding the mixture as it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat, giving a rich texture and moisture as it melts during cooking.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for 2 hours. Steady, gentle boiling cooks the pudding through evenly and keeps the suet and starches from drying out or breaking apart. Too vigorous a boil can cause the mold to lose water and the texture to become crumbly.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, potato, flour, sugar, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, potato, flour, sugar, lemon. 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.

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