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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A steamed pudding made with bread crumbs, suet, flour, sugar, lemon rind and 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: 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

Prepare

  1. Make the bread crumbs.

  2. Shred and chop the suet finely.

  3. Strain the lemon juice.

Make the batter

  1. Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl and add the grated lemon rind.

  2. Beat the eggs, add the milk, and stir the liquid into the dry ingredients. Mix well.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased bowl, cover with buttered paper, and steam for about 1.5 hours.

  2. Turn the pudding onto a hot dish and pour either a custard sauce or a sweet white sauce around it.

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

Bread crumbs
Forms the body of the pudding and absorbs the liquid so it holds together when steamed.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Flour
Provides structure so the pudding sets firm rather than collapsing.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and moisture, and deepens the flavour.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks.
Lemons
Rind adds aromatic oils and juice adds acidity for a bright lemon flavour.

The step that matters

Steam at a gentle, steady simmer. Steaming gently and keeping the water topped up lets the egg and crumb mixture set evenly. Boiling too hard or letting the water run dry can make the pudding cook unevenly or turn heavy and wet.

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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