Skip to main content
Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A baked lemon pudding made with flour, water, eggs, sugar, lemon, and topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Mix flour with cold water until smooth, then stir in boiling water and let it thicken and boil.

  2. In a bowl, beat together egg yolks, sugar, lemon juice, and grated rind.

  3. Stir the boiling starch into the egg mixture.

  4. Pour the mixture into a pie plate lined with pie crust and bake.

Top and brown

  1. Once done, remove from oven and spread meringue made from beaten egg whites and powdered sugar on top.

  2. Return to the oven for 2-3 minutes to brown slightly, being careful not to overbake.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Thickens the boiled starch that gives the filling its body.
Egg yolks
Enrich and set the custard, adding richness and body to the filling.
Egg whites
Whipped into meringue, they form a light topping that browns in the oven.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the meringue and helps it hold a stable, glossy structure.

The step that matters

Browning the meringue. Meringue needs only a brief stretch in the oven to brown slightly. Overbaking can make it weep, shrink, or toughen, and it can overcook the custard underneath.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, 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.

More lemon pudding recipes

Baked 36Boiled 25Cold 13Sauce 9Steamed 8Cornstarch 6 See all 470 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes