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Dessert

Queen Pudding

A baked milk and bread crumb pudding flavored with lemon and topped with jelly and whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Queen Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. In a bowl, combine milk, bread crumbs, egg yolks, sugar, and lemon rind.

Bake the base

  1. Bake for 30 minutes, ensuring the mixture is not watery.

Top and brown

  1. Whip the egg whites until soft peaks form, then gradually add sugar and lemon juice.

  2. Spread a layer of jelly over the pudding, then top with the whipped egg whites and brown lightly in the oven.

Serve

  1. Serve cold with cream.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

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

  5. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk and give the custard its body and structure.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set, giving it a rich, tender texture.
Milk
Provides the liquid that sets with the crumbs and yolks into a soft custard.
Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that forms a light, airy topping that browns in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and, when added gradually, stabilizes the whipped egg white topping.

The step that matters

Adding sugar to the whipped egg whites. Adding the sugar gradually after soft peaks form helps create a stable, glossy foam that holds its shape and browns evenly. Adding it too early or too fast can slow whipping or leave the foam weak and runny.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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