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Dessert

Thanksgiving Pudding

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 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, 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, then stir well.

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

Make the sauce and serve

  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 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dense pudding together as it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich in texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acidic ingredients to lighten the pudding and help it rise.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, along with a deep molasses flavour.
Egg
Adds richness and structure to the sauce, and the whipped white lightens it.
Raisins
Add sweetness, chewy texture and moisture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the beaten egg white. Beaten egg white traps air that gives the sauce lightness. Stirring it hard deflates those bubbles, so fold slowly and only until just combined.

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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