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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A bread pudding made with sliced light bread, suet, lemon peel, custard, 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 with a small amount of beef suet and grated lemon peel until the dish is lightly filled.

  3. In a bowl, whisk together the eggs and milk to make a custard. Pour the custard over the bread gradually.

Cook and serve

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

  2. For the sauce, mix the flour with cold water until smooth. Stir the flour mixture into the boiling water and let it boil for a few minutes.

  3. Sweeten the sauce and add the lemon juice. If desired, stir in the butter and add lemon peel or flavoring for extra taste.

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 custard and help set the pudding as it cooks.
Light bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the custard.
Milk
Makes the custard, adding moisture and softness to the pudding.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the sauce so it becomes smooth and coating.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil gently for the full hour. Gentle heat lets the egg custard set evenly through the bread. Vigorous boiling can make the pudding rough and break up its texture.

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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