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Dessert

Carrot Pudding

A steamed pudding made with carrots, suet, flour, sugar, currants, nutmeg, cloves, eggs, and wine or brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Carrot Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. Boil the carrots until tender, then strain through a colander.

  2. In a large bowl, mix the strained carrots with suet, flour, sugar, currants, nutmeg, and ground cloves.

Steam

  1. Transfer the mixture to a pudding mold and steam for 3.5 hours.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, beat the egg whites and yolks separately.

  2. Add half the sugar to the yolks and the other half to the whites, then beat lightly.

  3. Combine the mixtures and add the flavoring.

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. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Cooked and strained, they supply the moist body of the pudding.
Suet
Solid fat that melts during steaming, making the pudding rich and moist.
Flour
Starch that thickens the mixture and gives the steamed pudding its set structure.
Eggs
Proteins that bind the sauce, and beaten whites trap air for lightness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps keep the pudding moist.
Currants
Dried fruit that adds sweetness and chewy texture.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites separately and combining lightly. Whites whipped to soft peaks hold air that lightens the sauce. Overbeating them or stirring vigorously when combining deflates the foam and makes the sauce heavy.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, flour, sugar, nutmeg, clove, egg, wine):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, flour, sugar, nutmeg, clove, egg, wine. 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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