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Dessert

Carrot Pudding

A steamed pudding made with grated carrots, potatoes, flour, raisins, sugar, butter, spices, baking soda, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Carrot Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Thoroughly mix all ingredients together.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a suitable steaming dish.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for three hours.

  2. Serve with butter or hard 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. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  4. Carrot + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,424 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Potato + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,052 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Add moisture and natural sweetness, giving the pudding its soft, dense body.
Potatoes
Add moisture and starch, helping the pudding stay soft and hold together.
All-purpose flour
Provides structure, setting the pudding as the starches cook.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the pudding moist.
Seeded raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness throughout the pudding.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, moist crumb.

The step that matters

Steam for the full three hours. The pudding needs a steady supply of steam for the whole time. If the water boils dry, the pudding dries out and cooks unevenly, so the texture suffers.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, flour, raisin, sugar, egg, butter, nutmeg):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, flour, raisin, sugar, egg, butter, nutmeg. 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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