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Dessert

Queen of Puddings

A custard-like pudding made with egg yolks, milk, lemon rind, bread crumbs, butter, topped with jam and meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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.

Make the custard

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

  2. Beat together the yolks of 4 eggs and ½ cup sugar.

  3. Add 1 quart of sweet milk, grated rind of 1 lemon, 1 pint of fine bread crumbs, and an egg-sized piece of butter. Mix well and pour into a baking dish.

  4. Bake until set.

Top and finish

  1. Spread a layer of jam or jelly over the top.

  2. Beat the whites of 4 eggs until stiff. Mix in ½ cup sugar and juice of ½ lemon.

  3. Spread the meringue over the jam layer. Brown lightly in the oven.

  4. Serve hot or 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 + 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. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Egg + breadtop 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

Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set into a soft, tender body.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk and form the body of the pudding.
Egg whites
Whip into a stiff foam that forms the light, browned meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and, whipped with the whites, stabilises the meringue.
Milk
Provides the liquid that sets with the eggs into a custard.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until stiff. Whites must be whipped to a firm foam before the sugar is folded in; under-beaten or greasy whites will not hold their shape and the meringue will weep or stay flat.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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