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Dessert

Carrot Pudding

A baked carrot custard made with biscuit powder, eggs, cream, and flavored with orange flower water or rosewater.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Boil the carrot until soft.

  2. Mash the carrot in a bowl.

Make and bake the pudding

  1. Mix in the biscuit powder, egg yolks, egg whites, cream, orange flower water or rosewater, sugar, and ratafia.

  2. Pour the mixture into a shallow baking dish.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.

Serve

  1. Turn out the pudding and serve with sugar sprinkled on top.

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

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

  3. Carrot + biscuittop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Biscuit + orangetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together371 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Biscuit + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrot
Provides the bulk and moist, tender body of the pudding.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set into a soft, rich texture.
Egg whites
Add structure and lift, helping the pudding set and hold its shape.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the pudding a smooth, tender texture.
Biscuit powder
Absorbs liquid and gives the pudding body and a light crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps soften the set texture.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Eggs set as they heat, and overbaking makes the proteins tighten and squeeze out liquid, leaving the pudding dry and curdled. Pull it from the oven once the centre is just firm.

Swap the carrot

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

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

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