This is a pudding for the coldest part of winter. January, probably. February if the cold hangs on. The kind of Sunday where the windows are running with condensation and nobody is going anywhere, and you need something on the hob for three hours that justifies the whole day.

The trick of a Sussex pond pudding is that you don't really do anything clever. You make a suet pastry, which takes about four minutes. You line a basin. You bury a pricked lemon in butter and demerara sugar, seal the lid, and put it in a pan of simmering water. Then you wait. For three and a half hours the kitchen slowly fills with the smell of lemon and caramel and something deep and buttery underneath, and you do other things: read, stoke the fire, wander in and top up the water.

When it comes out, you turn it out whole and carry it to the table. That's the rule. You do not portion this pudding in the kitchen. You cut it in front of the people who are going to eat it, because the moment the knife goes in and the butter-and-lemon pond floods out across the plate is the entire reason the pudding exists. There are few better feelings than that pause around the table when everyone leans in.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago: lemon, butter, sugar, patience. Some recipes don't need much more than that.