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Dessert

Carrot Pudding

A baked carrot pudding made with carrots, bread, butter, sugar, marmalade, eggs, nutmeg, and lined with puff pastry.

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 the carrots

  1. Scrape and boil the carrots until tender.

  2. Mash the carrots finely and strain through a colander.

Make the filling

  1. Add the bread, melted butter, sugar, marmalade (or orange peel), eggs, and nutmeg to the mashed carrots, then mix all ingredients well.

Bake and serve

  1. Line a baking dish with puff pastry and pour the mixture into it.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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 natural sweetness, and their mashed starch gives the pudding body.
Eggs
Set the mixture when baked, giving the pudding its firm, custard-like structure.
Bread
Soaks up moisture and adds body, helping the pudding hold together.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving a softer, more tender texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the crust brown during baking.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Eggs set as their proteins coagulate with heat. Pulling the pudding too early leaves it runny in the centre, while overbaking can make it dense and cause it to weep.

Swap the carrot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, sugar, orange, egg, 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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