It is made of a suet pastry, filled with butter and sugar, and is boiled or steamed for several hours.

After cooking for so long, the skin of the lemon, if included, almost candies like a marmalade in its own juices and that of the butter and sugar.

The recipe features an egg-enriched pastry wrapped around a "great piece of Butter".

[4] A recipe found by Florence White, and included in her 1932 book Good Things in England, was based on one supplied to her by H J Glover and said to have been made "boiled in a cloth (the correct way) in 1905 by an old cottage woman in the village of Westham":[10] Make a good suet crust, put in some currants, and a little sugar.

Put into the middle of one round a ball of butter mixed with sugar, using the proportions of a 1/2 lb.

Put into a floured cloth, tie up rather tightly and boil 3 hours or more according to size.Writing in 1939, the journalist and biographer Reginald Pound described "my native Sussex pond pudding" as "made of crust, brown sugar and butter", with lemons not mentioned.