Skip to main content
Dessert

Queen of Puddings

A custard-like pudding made with bread crumbs, milk, sugar, butter, egg yolks, lemon flavoring, topped with fruit jelly and frothy frosting.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a bowl, combine bread crumbs, milk, sugar, butter, egg yolks, and lemon flavoring. Mix well.

  3. Pour mixture into a baking dish and bake until set, like custard.

Top and bake

  1. In another bowl, beat egg whites until frothy.

  2. Gradually add powdered sugar and lemon juice, mixing until smooth.

  3. Spread a layer of fruit jelly over the hot custard.

  4. Top with the frosting and bake until slightly brown.

  5. Serve warm or with cold cream.

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
Form the body of the custard and soak up the milk to set softly.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the egg yolks set into a custard.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set when heated, giving it richness.
Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that becomes the light, airy topping.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the meringue topping and helps it stay smooth and glossy.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture in the custard.

The step that matters

Bake the custard until just set. Egg proteins set with heat, so overbaking makes the custard grainy, weepy and rubbery. Pull it when the centre barely wobbles, before the topping goes on.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes