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Carrot Pudding

A sweet pudding made from mashed potatoes, boiled carrots, flour, currants, raisins, sugar, butter, nutmeg, salt, and optional egg.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Bruise and beat the carrots to a paste.

  2. Mix all ingredients well.

Cook

  1. Boil the mixture in a cloth for 2 to 4 hours.

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. 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

Flour
Provides the starch and structure that hold the pudding together as it cooks.
Mashed potatoes
Adds moisture and body, with starch helping bind the pudding.
Carrots
Contribute moisture, body and natural sweetness to the pudding.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding stay moist.
Egg
Helps bind the mixture and sets as it cooks, adding structure.

The step that matters

Boiling in the cloth. The pudding must cook in steadily simmering water for the full time. If the water stops simmering or the pot boils dry, the pudding cooks unevenly and can turn dense or dry.

Swap the currant

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

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

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