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Dessert

Queen of Puddings

A baked pudding made with bread crumbs, sugar, eggs, lemon, butter, milk, topped with jelly or damsons and meringue, served cold with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

Queen of Puddings

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

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

  2. Beat together the bread crumbs, sugar, egg yolks, lemon rind, butter, and milk in a bowl.

  3. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish and bake until set.

Top and brown

  1. Spread a layer of jelly or preserved damsons over the pudding.

  2. Make a meringue by beating the egg whites with granulated sugar and lemon juice until stiff peaks form.

  3. Spread the meringue lightly over the pudding and brown it 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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (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 body of the pudding, soaking up the milk to set into a soft custard.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard so the pudding sets softly once baked.
Egg whites
Whipped into a meringue that gives a light, airy topping that browns in the oven.
Milk
Provides the liquid that, with the eggs, forms the set custard base.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the meringue and helps it stay stable and glossy when browned.
Jelly or preserved damsons
Adds a fruity, sweet-tart layer between the custard and the meringue.

The step that matters

Beating the meringue to stiff peaks. Egg whites must be whipped until stiff peaks form so they trap air and hold their shape. Under-whipped whites weep or collapse in the oven, while the sugar stabilises the foam as it bakes and browns.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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