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Carrot Pudding

A baked dessert made with boiled carrots, Savoy biscuits, eggs, butter, sugar, nutmeg, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 368 recipes. Both carry maltol, which smells caramel, sweet. The science ↓

Carrot Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Boil and pulp the carrots through a sieve.

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the pulped carrots with Savoy biscuits, egg yolks, and beaten egg whites.

  2. Add softened butter, nutmeg, sugar, lemon rind, and lemon juice. Combine all ingredients well.

  3. Bake in a buttered pie dish until set.

  4. Serve warm.

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

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Carrot + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Biscuit + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together697 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Provide the bulk and moisture of the pudding, with a soft, tender body when pulped.
Egg yolks
Enrich the mixture and help it set into a custard-like texture when baked.
Egg whites
Add lightness and help the pudding rise and hold its structure as it sets.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the pudding.
Savoy biscuits
Bind the pulped carrots and soak up moisture to give the pudding body.

The step that matters

Bake in a buttered pie dish until set. Egg proteins set with heat, so the pudding must be baked only until firm. Overbaking makes eggs curdle and dry out, while underbaking leaves it loose in the centre.

Swap the carrot

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, egg, butter, nutmeg, sugar, lemon. 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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