Skip to main content
Dessert

Virginia Pudding

A lemon and wine pudding made with milk, pudding flour, eggs, sugar, and lemon rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,157 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Virginia Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Scald the milk and pour it over the pudding flour.

  2. Add the yolks of the eggs, the whites beaten to a stiff froth, and the grated lemon rind.

  3. Bake for 20 minutes.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Beat the egg whites to a stiff froth.

  2. Mix the beaten egg whites with sugar, wine, and lemon juice.

  3. Pour the sauce over the pudding just before serving.

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. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Pudding flour
Thickens the milk into a set, custard-like base for the pudding.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set during baking.
Egg whites
Beaten to a stiff froth, they lighten the pudding and form the topping sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour and eggs thicken and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the beaten egg white sauce and balances the lemon acidity.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites to a stiff froth. Whites must be beaten until they hold stiff peaks so they trap air. Underbeaten whites collapse and make the pudding and sauce dense and flat.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, egg, sugar, wine. 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.

You might also like

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