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Dessert

Queen Pudding

A custard-like bread pudding made with bread crumbs, milk, sugar, butter, and eggs, topped with meringue and jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Queen 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.

Prepare and bake

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Combine bread crumbs, milk, sugar, butter, nutmeg or mace, lemon rind, and egg yolks in a bowl.

  3. Prepare as you would for Bread Custard Pudding.

  4. Pour the mixture into a shallow square pan, about 1½ inches deep, and bake until the custard is set.

Make the meringue

  1. While the pudding bakes, beat the egg whites and mix with powdered sugar to make a meringue.

  2. Spread some meringue over the set pudding and mark the top into squares.

  3. Using a piping bag, form a ring on each square with the remaining meringue, dust with sugar, and bake until golden brown.

Finish and serve

  1. Once done, fill each ring with jelly or fruit jam.

  2. Cut the pudding into squares and serve with cream or wine sauce.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Form the bulk of the pudding and soak up the milk to give it body.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the egg proteins set into a soft custard.
Eggs
Set when heated to bind the custard and give the pudding its structure.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, smooth texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the meringue brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Set the custard before adding the meringue. Egg proteins firm as they heat. If the custard is underbaked it stays loose and can weep under the meringue, so it should be fully set before the meringue goes on.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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