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Dessert

Queens Pudding

A sweet bread pudding with a jelly topping and a meringue-like egg white layer.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Queens 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.

Prepare the custard base

  1. Pour the warmed milk over the bread crumbs and let it soak.

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the sugar and butter until well combined.

  3. Mix the egg yolk mixture into the soaked bread crumbs.

Top and bake

  1. Spread jelly or preserves over the top of the mixture.

  2. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form, then add the sugar and mix well.

  3. Spread the egg white mixture over the top of the pudding.

  4. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until light brown.

Serve

  1. Serve warm with sauce or cold with sugar and 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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Soak up the warm milk to form the body of the pudding.
Milk
Moistens the crumbs and sets with the eggs to form a soft custard.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set into a tender, creamy texture.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form a meringue topping that browns in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and, dissolved into the whites, stabilizes the meringue.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites to stiff peaks. Under-whipped whites collapse and weep, while over-beaten whites turn dry and grainy. Stiff, glossy peaks hold the meringue topping up during baking.

“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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