Skip to main content
Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A lemon-flavored pudding made from flour, sugar, breadcrumbs, suet, eggs, and milk, boiled to a porridge consistency.

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

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 batter

  1. In a bowl, combine flour, sugar, bread crumbs, chopped suet, lemon juice, and grated lemon peel.

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

Cook and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a basin and boil 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the bulk of the structure as it sets into a soft, cakelike body.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm as it cooks.
Suet
Adds richness and fat, giving the pudding a moist, tender texture.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and add body, giving the pudding a light, soft crumb.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Pour the mixture into a basin and boil for one hour. The basin must be sealed or covered so steam cooks the pudding evenly without water entering. Keep the water boiling gently and topped up, since a drop in temperature leads to a heavy, underdone centre.

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.

More lemon pudding recipes

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes