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Dessert

Boiled Puddings

A sweet pudding made by boiling water, lemon rind, sugar, arrowroot, lemon juice, brandy or wine, and egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Boiled Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil water with lemon rind and lump sugar for 10 minutes.

  2. Remove lemon peel and stir in arrowroot mixed with lemon juice.

  3. Take sauce off heat and add brandy or wine, adjusting arrowroot if needed.

Decorate and cook the pudding

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

  2. Fill the mold with the pudding mixture after adding the egg yolk, then steam or boil 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. Lemon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: acetoin (butter, cream).

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

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

  4. Arrowroot + brandytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together141 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Lump sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Arrowroot
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it a smooth body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavour to the sauce.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps bind the pudding mixture.
Brandy or white wine
Adds aroma and depth of flavour to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stir arrowroot into the sauce and add brandy off the heat. Arrowroot thickens only as it heats, but prolonged boiling can thin it again. Adding the alcohol off the heat keeps its aroma from cooking away.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Arrowrootthe original
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Sweet potatofits about as well
  4. Asparagusfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, 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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