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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A sweet lemon-flavored pudding made with flour, sugar, bread crumbs, suet, lemon juice, 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

Make the pudding

  1. Combine flour, sugar, bread crumbs, chopped suet, lemon juice, and grated lemon peel in a basin.

  2. Add the eggs and enough milk to achieve a porridge-like consistency.

Cook 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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and add structure as they set during cooking.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and moist as it cooks.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding a light, tender body.
Flour
Provides structure, helping the mixture hold together as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma from the juice and grated peel.

The step that matters

Adding enough milk to reach a porridge consistency. Too little liquid leaves the crumbs and flour dry and dense, while too much makes the batter loose and slack. Reaching a thick, spoonable porridge texture gives the starches and crumbs enough moisture to swell and set evenly during the long boil.

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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