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Dessert

Carrot Pudding

A baked carrot dessert made with biscuit powder, eggs, cream, and flavored with ratafia and orange or rose water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 737 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Carrot Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Boil the carrot until tender.

  2. Crush the carrot in a mortar.

  3. Add the biscuit powder or crushed biscuits.

Make and bake

  1. Add the egg yolks, egg whites, cream, ratafia, orange or rose water, nutmeg, and sugar.

  2. Bake in a shallow dish lined with pastry until set.

Serve

  1. Dust with sugar 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. Carrot + orangetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together737 recipes

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

  2. Biscuit + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together368 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Orange + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrot
Forms the bulk of the pudding and gives it body and a gentle sweetness.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and help it set when baked.
Egg whites
Add structure and lightness, helping the filling set firm.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds a little browning on the surface.
Biscuit powder
Absorbs liquid and gives the filling a light, crumbly body.

The step that matters

Bake until just set. Eggs thicken as they heat, so baking past set makes the custard curdle and weep. Pull it from the oven once the centre barely wobbles.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (biscuit, egg, cream, orange, nutmeg, sugar):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, egg, cream, orange, nutmeg, sugar. 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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