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Dessert

Lemon Meringue Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with milk, bread crumbs, eggs, and lemon, topped with a meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lemon Meringue Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the base

  1. Scald the milk with butter, salt, and baking soda.

  2. Pour the hot mixture over the bread crumbs.

  3. Let it cool.

  4. Stir in the beaten egg yolks, sugar, and lemon rind.

Bake

  1. Bake for 20 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

Make and brown the meringue

  1. Beat the egg whites with sugar and lemon juice until stiff.

  2. Spread the meringue over the pudding.

  3. Brown in the oven.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the pudding base as they set, giving it a soft, custard-like body.
Egg whites
Whip into a foam that sets into the light, airy meringue topping.
Milk
Provides the liquid that softens the crumbs and forms the creamy pudding base.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and give the pudding its body and structure.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the meringue become stable and glossy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavour to the meringue.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites with sugar until stiff. Whites must be beaten until they hold firm peaks; under-beaten whites stay loose and can weep or slump, while sugar added gradually helps the foam stay stable.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, bread, egg, sugar. 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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