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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A steamed pudding made with sliced bread, beef suet, lemon peel, eggs, milk, and a lemon‑flavored sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. Grease a pudding dish with butter.

  2. Layer thin slices of light bread, a little shredded beef suet, and grated lemon peel in the dish, repeating until lightly filled.

  3. In a bowl, whisk together the eggs and milk, then pour it over the bread gradually.

Cook the pudding

  1. Cover the pudding with a paper cap and boil gently for 1 hour.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, mix the flour with cold water, then stir it into the boiling water and let it boil for a few minutes.

  2. Sweeten the sauce, add the lemon juice, and optionally stir in the butter.

  3. For extra flavor, add boiled lemon peel or a few drops of lemon flavoring.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Beef + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

Butter and flour 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

Eggs
Bind the milk and bread together and help the pudding set as it cooks.
Light bread
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the custard mixture.
Milk
Soaks into the bread and forms the custard that sets during cooking.
Flour
Thickens the boiling water into the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture to the boiling water. Flour mixed with cold water must be stirred into boiling water and boiled for a few minutes so the starch swells and thickens the sauce evenly without lumps.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, bread, beef, egg, milk, flour):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, beef, egg, milk, 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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