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Dessert

Boiled Puddings

A lemon and brandy pudding thickened with arrowroot, steamed or boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Boiled Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil ¼ cup of water gently with the thin rind of ½ lemon and 1½ ounces of sugar for about 10 minutes.

  2. Remove the lemon peel and stir in 1 teaspoon of arrowroot mixed smoothly with the strained juice of the lemon and optional orange juice.

  3. Take the sauce off the heat and add ½ cup of brandy or ⅓ cup of sherry, adjusting the arrowroot if using wine.

Decorate and fill the mold

  1. Decorate the mold with small leaves of citron rind and split muscatel raisins for Sir Edwin Landseer's pudding.

  2. Fill the spaces with cleaned and dried currants mixed with candied orange or lemon rind.

Finish and cook

  1. Add 1 egg yolk to the pudding mixture, pour it into the mold, and steam or boil for the same time.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Arrowroot + orangetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Orange + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Brandy + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,340 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Thickens the sauce so it becomes smooth and glossy when stirred in and heated.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps bind the pudding mixture as it cooks.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the sauce and balances the acidity of the lemon juice.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavour to the sauce; sherry or white wine may be used instead.

The step that matters

Adding the arrowroot to the sauce. Arrowroot must be mixed smoothly with cold liquid before it goes into the sauce, otherwise it forms lumps. It thickens when heated, so adjusting it is needed when wine replaces brandy, since the liquid volume changes the final thickness.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, sugar, arrowroot, brandy, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Raisinfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, arrowroot, brandy, 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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