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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A baked lemon pudding made with bread crumbs, sugar, suet, flour, lemon rind and juice, milk, 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 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Grate the lemon peel.

  2. Mix the lemon peel with bread crumbs, sugar, suet, and well-beaten eggs.

  3. Stew the lemon juice and adjust consistency with a little milk.

Steam in the mold

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered mold.

  2. Tie a cloth dipped in boiling water and floured around the mold.

  3. Boil for 3 hours.

Serve

  1. Sprinkle with sifted sugar before serving.

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. Sugar + flourtop 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
Provide body and bulk, soaking up moisture to give the pudding its structure.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during boiling to hold the pudding together.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tart lemon.
Lemons
Rind adds fragrant citrus aroma and juice adds acidity for brightness.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding with a well-floured, tightly tied cloth. The floured cloth keeps the pudding from soaking up too much water while it steams, and a tight seal keeps the surface from drying out or turning soggy during the long boil.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, flour, milk, 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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