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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A baked lemon pudding made with bread crumbs, sugar, milk, eggs, butter, and lemon zest and juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Lemon 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.

Make the pudding base

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan, then stir in the butter until melted.

  2. Pour the hot milk over the bread crumbs in a bowl.

  3. Add the sugar and grated lemon zest, mixing well.

  4. Beat the eggs in a separate bowl and then add them to the mixture.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered pie dish lined with pastry.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

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

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 hot milk and form the soft, body-giving bulk of the pudding.
Eggs
Set as the pudding bakes, giving it a firm, custard-like structure.
Milk
Provides liquid that softens the crumbs and cooks into a creamy base.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown during baking.
Lemon
Zest adds fragrant aroma and juice adds acidity that brightens the sweetness.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that makes the pudding tender and smooth.

The step that matters

Beat the eggs before adding them. Beaten eggs mix evenly into the warm crumb mixture, so they set uniformly during baking instead of forming lumps or uneven pockets.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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