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Dessert

Light Steamed Pudding

A steamed lemon pudding made with butter, sugar, flour, eggs, and lemon zest and juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Light Steamed Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Chop the lemon peel very fine.

  2. Cream the butter and lemon peel together.

  3. Add the sugar and mix well.

  4. Gently fold in the flour.

  5. Add the yolks of the eggs and lemon juice.

Fold and steam

  1. Finally, fold in the whipped egg whites until stiff.

  2. Steam for 80 minutes.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar, it gives the pudding richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the butter cream to a light, aerated base.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together after steaming.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the batter, while whipped whites lighten and raise it.
Lemon juice
Adds bright acidity that balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Lemon peel
Finely chopped peel carries the lemon aroma throughout the batter.

The step that matters

Fold in the whipped egg whites until stiff. Whipped whites trap air that makes the pudding light. Folding gently keeps that air in, while vigorous stirring deflates the batter and leaves a dense pudding.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, flour, egg. 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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