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Dessert

Carrot Pudding

A steamed pudding made with grated carrots, suet, raisins, currants, sugar, flour, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour 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 hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine grated carrots, chopped suet, raisins, currants, sugar, flour, and spices in a bowl and mix until well combined.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a greased pudding mold.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for about 1 hour or until set.

  2. Let cool slightly 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Grated carrots
Provide the main bulk and moisture that give the pudding its body.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the pudding and keeps it moist and tender as it steams.
Flour
Gives structure so the mixture holds together and sets when steamed.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the flavour of the carrots and dried fruit.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Steam until set. Steaming gently cooks the flour and suet through without drying the pudding. Cooking too briefly leaves the mixture wet and unset, while overcooking can make it dense and dry.

Swap the currant

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

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

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