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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A sweet lemon pudding made with butter, sugar, crackers, wine, eggs, cream, and lemon zest.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  2. Roll the crackers into fine crumbs.

  3. Add the cream and then the cracker crumbs.

  4. Extract the juice from the lemons and add it to the mixture.

  5. Grate the rind of one lemon and add it along with the wine.

  6. Beat the eggs separately and fold them into the mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake with a bottom crust and pieces of dough on top.

  2. Serve with any preferred 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Creams with the sugar to give the pudding a rich, tender body.
Eggs
Beaten and folded in to set the custard and give it structure as it bakes.
Cream
Adds moisture and fat, producing a smoother, softer texture.
Lemons
Juice and rind supply the acidity and bright aroma that define the flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and helps cream the butter into a light base.
Crackers
Fine crumbs add body and absorb liquid, thickening the filling.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten eggs. Eggs should be beaten separately and folded in gently so the mixture stays light. Overmixing deflates the air and can make the set pudding dense.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, wine, egg, cream, sugar. 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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