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Dessert

Boiled Lemon Pudding

A boiled pudding made from suet, breadcrumbs, sugar, flour, lemon peel, lemon juice, eggs, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Mix the suet, breadcrumbs, sugar, and flour together.

  2. Add the finely minced lemon peel and strained lemon juice.

  3. Moisten with the eggs and enough milk to achieve a thick batter consistency.

Boil and serve

  1. Pour into a well-buttered mold and boil for 3½ hours.

  2. Turn out, sprinkle with sifted sugar, and serve with or without 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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

Suet
Adds richness and a moist, tender crumb as it melts during boiling.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb liquid and give the pudding its body and soft structure.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help set the pudding as it cooks.
Lemons
Provide the aroma and tart flavor from the peel and juice.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and helps flavor the pudding.

The step that matters

Boiling the pudding for the full time. The pudding must cook through gently for the whole 3½ hours so the eggs set and the suet melts evenly. Stopping early or letting the water boil too hard can leave the centre dense or the mold misshapen.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, 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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