Skip to main content
Dessert

Carrot Plum Pudding

A steamed pudding made with grated carrots, raisins, currants, suet, sugar, walnuts, flour, mace, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Plum Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine grated carrots, raisins, currants, chopped suet, sugar, chopped walnuts, flour, mace, and cinnamon in a large bowl. Mix well, ensuring no additional liquid is added except for the moisture from the carrots.

  2. Fill baking powder cans three-quarters full with the mixture.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam the cans for 3 hours.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Walnut + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Carrot + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together981 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Grated carrots
Provide moisture and body, so the pudding stays moist without added liquid.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and tender as it steams.
Flour
Gives the mixture structure so it holds together when steamed.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown slightly.

The step that matters

Filling the cans three-quarters full. Steamed batters expand as they heat and need room to rise; overfilling can cause the mixture to spill or cook unevenly.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

You might also like

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesRed Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipes