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Dessert

Thanksgiving Pudding

A steamed pudding made with raisins, suet, flour, sugar, spices, carrot, potato, and a butter‑powdered sugar sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 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 ↓

Thanksgiving Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, mix chopped raisins with flour, brown sugar, chopped suet, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, lemon juice, lemon rind, citron, and salt.

  2. Add grated carrot and grated potato mixed with dissolved baking soda, and stir well.

  3. Steam or boil in a mold for 3 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, cream together butter and powdered sugar.

  2. Beat in the egg yolk, then gently fold in the beaten egg white.

  3. Sprinkle the sauce with nutmeg before serving.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Raisins
Add sweetness, chewy texture and moisture to the pudding.
All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Baking soda
Reacts with the grated carrot and potato to help the pudding rise and lighten.
Egg
The yolk enriches the sauce, while the folded white adds lightness.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, along with a deeper caramel flavor.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg white. Beaten egg white traps air that gives the sauce lightness. Folding gently keeps that air in; vigorous stirring deflates it and makes the sauce dense.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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