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Dessert

Individual Lemon Puddings

A baked lemon pudding made with a lemon mixture, egg yolks, egg whites, and garnished with currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Individual Lemon Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Heat the lemon pudding mixture in a saucepan over medium heat until thick and pasty.

  2. Beat the egg yolks until light and stir them into the mixture.

  3. Whip the egg whites until stiff peaks form and gently fold them into the mixture.

  4. Pour the mixture into cups or paper cases.

Bake and serve

  1. If desired, prepare meringue and drop a tablespoonful on top before baking.

  2. Bake until golden, then add spots of bright red currant jelly on top.

  3. Serve immediately from the oven, as they will fall quickly.

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 + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + curranttop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Egg + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Egg yolks
Enrich the pudding and add richness and body as they thicken the mixture.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they lighten the mixture and help it rise during baking.

The step that matters

Serve immediately from the oven. The whipped egg white structure begins to collapse as the puddings cool, so they fall quickly and lose their height.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, egg. 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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