Skip to main content
Dessert

Lemon Suet Pudding

A steamed pudding made with suet, lemon, flour, and shredded wheat biscuits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Wheat and biscuit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 116 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Lemon Suet Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the suet finely.

  2. Stir the suet and all the dry ingredients together.

Make the batter

  1. Beat the egg, then add the water and lemon juice.

  2. Stir the wet mixture thoroughly with the dry ingredients.

Steam and serve

  1. Turn the mixture into a pudding mold and steam for 2 hours.

  2. Serve with Clear Lemon Sauce or Foamy Orange Sauce.

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. Wheat + biscuittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together116 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Flour + biscuittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Wheat + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 recipes

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

  4. Flour + wheattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Lemon + biscuittop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together697 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the pudding together as it cooks.
Egg
Binds the mixture and adds richness and structure.
Baking powder
Releases gas during steaming so the pudding rises and lightens.
Stale bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and add body to the soft, tender texture.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the sharpness of the lemon.

The step that matters

Stir the wet mixture into the dry ingredients thoroughly. Thorough mixing hydrates the flour and crumbs evenly and distributes the baking powder, so the pudding sets uniformly and rises evenly while steaming.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesBaking Powder BiscuitBaking Powder Biscuit119 recipes