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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A lemon-flavored pudding made from flour, sugar, bread crumbs, suet, lemon juice and peel, eggs, and milk.

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

Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. In a basin, combine flour, sugar, bread crumbs, and chopped suet.

  2. Add the juice and grated peel of the lemon, eggs, and enough milk to achieve a porridge-like consistency.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil the mixture in a basin for one hour.

  2. Serve with or without 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. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Flour
Provides the starch and structure that hold the pudding together as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Soak up liquid and give the pudding a soft, light body.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set as it heats, giving it firmness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavour that cuts the richness of the suet.

The step that matters

Adding the milk to a porridge-like consistency. Flour and bread crumbs absorb liquid as they cook. Too little milk leaves the pudding dense and dry, while too much makes it loose and slack, so the texture depends on getting this balance right.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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Baked 36Boiled 25Cold 13Sauce 9Steamed 8Cornstarch 6 See all 470 →

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