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Dessert

Lemon Pudding, Boiled

A steamed pudding made from bread crumbs, flour, suet, sugar, lemon, eggs, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix the bread crumbs, flour, suet, and sugar together.

  2. Add the well-beaten yolks of the eggs, lemon juice, and grated lemon rinds.

  3. Gradually add milk until a stiff yet moist mixture forms.

Steam and serve

  1. Turn into a buttered basin and steam for about 2 to 3 hours.

  2. Serve with cornflour or sweet melted butter 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
Yolks bind the mixture and add richness and structure as it steams.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender.
Bread crumbs
Form the body of the pudding and soak up moisture from the milk.
Lemons
Juice adds acidity and grated rind adds aroma.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon.

The step that matters

Gradually add milk until a stiff yet moist mixture forms. Bread crumbs absorb liquid over time, so adding milk slowly lets you judge the texture. Too much milk makes the pudding heavy and soggy, while too little leaves it dry and crumbly after steaming.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, 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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