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Dessert

Railway Pudding

A boiled pudding made with flour, suet, sugar, currants, raisins, grated potatoes, grated carrots, nutmeg, and candied orange peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Railway Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix all ingredients together thoroughly.

  2. Shape the mixture into a pudding.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the pudding for several hours.

  2. Serve with brandy 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. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

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

  3. Carrot + orangetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Forms the main structure that holds the dense pudding together as it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the texture and keeps the pudding moist and tender.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning and flavour develop during cooking.
Grated potatoes
Add starch and moisture, giving the pudding a soft, binding body.
Grated carrots
Add moisture and natural sweetness, adding body to the mixture.
Currants
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy fruit pieces throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding for several hours. A dense mixture needs long, steady cooking so heat reaches the centre and the starches gelatinise fully. Cutting the boiling short can leave the pudding heavy, wet, or undercooked in the middle.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, raisin, potato, carrot, nutmeg, orange. 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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