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Dessert

Boiled Lemon Pudding

A sweet, lemon-flavored pudding made with bread crumbs, suet, flour, eggs, milk, and lemon zest, boiled for several hours.

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 ↓

Boiled Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare 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 into the bread mixture.

  4. Add the lemon juice and peel.

  5. Sift the flour with the baking powder and gently fold it into the batter until just combined.

Boil and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold and boil for 3 hours.

  2. 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

Dry bread crumbs
Soak up the milk to form the body of the pudding.
Powdered beef suet
Adds richness and fat that keeps the pudding moist as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set to give the pudding its structure.
Flour
Provides structure so the pudding holds its shape when cooked.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lifts the batter and lightens the texture.
Lemon
Juice adds acidity and brightness; peel adds aromatic oils.

The step that matters

Folding in the flour and baking powder. Overmixing once the flour is added develops gluten and deflates the batter, making the pudding dense. Fold gently, only until combined, so the baking powder's gas stays trapped and the texture stays 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.

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