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Dessert

LA Regina Pudding

A layered custard pudding made with bread crumbs, sponge cake, macaroons, jelly, sherry, and eggs, baked in a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,145 recipes mention both. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: egg, milk, wheat, shellfish (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the custard

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in milk.

  2. Cream the sugar with the butter.

  3. Beat the egg yolks and whites separately.

  4. Mix the whipped yolks with the soaked bread crumbs, lemon juice, and grated lemon peel. Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

Assemble the mold

  1. Butter a round mold and layer fine dry crumbs at the bottom.

  2. Add a layer of macaroons, then half an inch of the mixture.

  3. Layer slices of sponge cake spread with jelly, more macaroons, and wet with sherry, followed by more custard.

  4. Repeat layers until all ingredients are used, finishing with custard on top.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover the mold, place it in a pan of boiling water, and bake for 1 hour.

  2. Uncover and brown the top.

  3. Turn out onto a hot platter and pour over a sauce made from warmed currant jelly, beaten with melted butter and sherry.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Bread + buttertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,145 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together81,222 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Bread + milktop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together11,363 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Butter + crabtop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together812 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Bread + eggtop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together22,584 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whipped yolks and stiffly beaten whites give the pudding its light, set custard structure.
Bread crumbs
Soaked in milk, they add moisture and body to the custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps it brown on top.
Sponge cake
Absorbs the jelly and sherry, adding moisture and flavor between layers.
Macaroons
Add almond flavor and a chewy, moist texture between the custard layers.
Jelly
Adds fruity sweetness and acidity to the cake layers and the final sauce.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites. Whites hold air only when fully whipped and gently folded, so over-mixing deflates them and the pudding bakes up dense rather than light.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

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

  1. Vanillabetter flavor fit
  2. Applebetter flavor fit
  3. Figbetter flavor fit
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, sugar, butter, egg, crab, sherry. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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