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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A sweet pudding made with bread, beef suet, lemon, custard, and a lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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. Butter a pudding basin.

  2. Layer thin slices of light bread in the basin. Sprinkle with finely shredded beef suet and grated lemon peel.

  3. Repeat layers until the basin is lightly filled.

Make the custard and cook

  1. In a bowl, whisk together 2 eggs and ½ pint of milk.

  2. Pour the custard over the bread gradually.

  3. Cover the pudding with a paper cap.

  4. Boil gently for 1 hour.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, mix 1 tablespoon of flour with cold water.

  2. Stir into ½ pint of boiling water and let it boil for 1 minute.

  3. Sweeten the sauce and add the juice of 1 lemon.

  4. Optionally, add ½ ounce of butter and lemon peel or 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 custard and help set the pudding as it cooks.
Light bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the custard as it cooks.
Beef suet
Adds richness and moistness to the layers as it melts during cooking.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it becomes smooth and coating.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the boiling water. Flour mixed with cold water must be stirred into boiling water and boiled briefly so the starch swells and thickens the sauce smoothly 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, sugar):

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

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