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Dessert

Plain Lemon Pudding

A steamed lemon pudding made with flour, suet, bread crumbs, sugar, eggs, and lemon rind and juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Plain Lemon Pudding

Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Plain Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the bread and squeeze it as dry as possible.

  2. In a bowl, combine the flour, suet, lemon rind, lemon juice, and sugar.

  3. Beat the eggs and mix them with the other ingredients to form a stiff paste.

  4. If the mixture is too dry, add a little milk.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-greased basin and steam for three hours.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 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. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Flour
Provides the bulk and structure that holds the stiff paste together.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help give the pudding its set structure when steamed.
Bread crumbs
Add moisture and body, softening the paste as it steams.
Suet
Adds fat, giving a rich, tender texture to the steamed pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemon rind
Contributes concentrated lemon aroma and flavour from the peel's oils.

The step that matters

Squeezing the soaked bread dry. Excess water left in the bread thins the paste and can make the steamed pudding soggy and loose, so the bread should be pressed as dry as possible before mixing.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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