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Dessert

Boiled Lemon Pudding

A boiled pudding made with bread crumbs, flour, sugar, lemon zest and juice, boiled milk, eggs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Boiled Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Grate the bread crumbs and mix with flour, sugar, lemon zest, and lemon juice.

  2. Pour the hot boiled milk over the mixture and cover.

  3. Let it stand for 30 minutes.

  4. Beat the eggs and add them to the mixture.

Steam and serve

  1. Grease a pudding bowl and place a teacup upside down in the center.

  2. Pour the mixture around and over the cup, filling the bowl to the top.

  3. Boil for 2 hours, ensuring the water does not touch the bowl.

  4. Carefully turn out the pudding, remove the cup, and fill the space with lemon sauce.

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

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and form the body of the pudding.
Flour
Thickens the batter and gives the pudding a set, sliceable structure.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon
Provides acidity and bright aroma from the zest and juice.

The step that matters

Boil for 2 hours, keeping the water away from the bowl. Steaming gently and evenly sets the egg and starch mixture without cracking or making it soggy. If water enters the bowl or the boil is too hard, the texture turns watery or rough, so the bowl must stay above or clear of the water while the pudding cooks.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, sugar, milk, egg, butter. 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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