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Dessert

Vegetable Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with grated carrots, potatoes, apples, suet, raisins, sugar, flour, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Vegetable Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Sift the flour, baking soda, and salt together.

  2. Mix the grated carrots, raw potatoes, apples, and suet in a large bowl.

Make the pudding

  1. Add the sifted flour and spices to the mixture.

  2. Stir in the raisins.

  3. Steam the mixture for 3 hours or more.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it steams.
Suet
Adds fat, giving the pudding a moist, rich texture.
Baking soda
Reacts to lighten the batter so the pudding is less dense.
Grated apples
Add moisture and a light natural sweetness.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture.

The step that matters

Steam the mixture for 3 hours or more. Long, gentle steaming cooks the starches and fat through and keeps the pudding moist. Steam that runs dry or stops early leaves it dense and underdone.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, apple, raisin, sugar, flour, cinnamon, clove):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, apple, raisin, sugar, flour, cinnamon, clove. 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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