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Dessert

Boiled Lemon Pudding

A steamed pudding made with flour, sugar, lemon zest and juice, egg, breadcrumbs, suet, baking powder, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine flour and baking powder. Add finely chopped suet, sugar, breadcrumbs, lemon zest, and lemon juice.

  2. Mix in the egg and enough milk to form a batter.

Steam

  1. Grease a pudding mold and pour in the mixture.

  2. Steam for 2 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.

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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Flour
Provides the main structure that holds the pudding together as it steams.
Egg
Binds the mixture and helps give the pudding its set texture.
Breadcrumbs
Add bulk and soak up moisture, giving the pudding a soft, tender crumb.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it cooks.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking, helping the pudding rise and become light.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to the pudding's flavor and browning.

The step that matters

Steam for 2 hours. Steaming gently and steadily cooks the batter through without drying it out. If the water boils dry or the steam drops, the pudding can turn heavy or unevenly cooked.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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