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Dessert

Queen Pudding

A sweet bread pudding with lemon, currant jelly, and meringue topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Queen 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 custard base

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

  2. In a bowl, combine bread crumbs, milk, egg yolks, sugar, and lemon rind.

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

Top and brown

  1. Spread a layer of currant jelly on top.

  2. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff, then gradually add 1 cup of sugar.

  3. Spread the meringue over the jelly layer and brown in the oven.

  4. Serve cold.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

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

  4. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

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

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 and soak up the milk to give it a soft, tender texture.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set, giving the pudding structure and richness.
Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff foam, they form the meringue topping that browns and stays light.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and, dissolved into the whites, helps the meringue stay glossy and stable.
Milk
Provides the liquid that moistens the crumbs and sets with the yolks into a custard.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites until stiff. Whites must be whipped to firm peaks before the sugar is added gradually; underbeaten whites collapse and weep, while overbeaten whites turn grainy and dry, so the meringue will not hold its shape or brown well.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Currantthe original

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