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Dessert

Lemon Suet Pudding

A baked suet pudding flavored with lemon, sugar, currants, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lemon Suet Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA brisk oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a brisk oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

Make and bake the pudding

  1. In a bowl, combine the bread crumbs, minced suet, pounded sugar, currants, lemon rind, lemon juice, and beaten eggs.

  2. Pour the mixture into a thickly buttered pan.

  3. Bake for 1 hour, moving it towards the oven door when it turns a fine brown color.

Serve

  1. Turn the pudding out of the dish before serving and sprinkle with sifted sugar if desired.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Bread + beeftop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and set into a firm, sliceable pudding as it bakes.
Bread crumbs
Provide the bulk and body that hold the pudding together.
Suet
Adds fat and richness, keeping the pudding moist as it bakes.
Pounded sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown as it bakes.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of fruitiness distributed through the pudding.
Lemon
Rind adds aromatic oils and juice adds bright acidity to balance the richness.

The step that matters

Moving the pudding toward the oven door as it browns. Browning is driven by surface heat, and the top can darken faster than the centre sets. Moving the pudding toward the door, where the oven runs cooler, slows browning so the interior cooks through without burning.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, beef, sugar, lemon, egg, butter. 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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