Skip to main content
Dessert

Boiled Lemon Pudding

A sweet pudding made from bread crumbs, suet, flour, baking powder, sugar, lemon, eggs, and milk, boiled until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Boiled Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in the milk.

  2. Add the suet to the soaked bread crumbs.

  3. Beat the eggs and sugar together, then mix them into the bread mixture.

  4. Add the lemon juice and peel.

  5. Sift the flour with the baking powder, then gently fold them into the mixture until just combined.

Boil and serve

  1. Pour the batter into a buttered mold.

  2. Boil for 3 hours.

  3. Serve hot with wine 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 + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Bread + beeftop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

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

  5. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Whipped eggs add air and bind the batter into a soft, set pudding.
Dry bread crumbs
Soaked in milk, they give the pudding its body and a tender crumb.
Baking powder
Releases gas when heated, helping the pudding rise and stay light.
Powdered beef suet
Adds fat that makes the pudding rich and moist as it cooks.
Lemon
Juice and peel add acidity and bright citrus aroma to the sweet batter.

The step that matters

Fold the flour and baking powder gently. Overmixing develops gluten and knocks air out of the whipped eggs, so the pudding turns dense instead of light.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes