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Dessert

Baked Lemon Pudding

A baked dessert made with lemon juice, rind, bread crumbs, butter, sugar, milk, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Baked Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in the milk for 30 minutes.

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  3. Add the beaten yolks of the eggs.

  4. Stir in the soaked bread crumbs, milk, lemon juice, and half the grated lemon rind.

Bake and top

  1. Butter a pudding dish.

  2. Pour in the mixture.

  3. Bake at 300°F (150°C) for 20 minutes.

  4. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  5. Add 2 teaspoons of sugar and spread over the baked pudding.

  6. Brown the surface delicately.

Serve

  1. Serve cold without sauce.

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. Butter + milktop 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. Lemon + milktop 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

Eggs
Yolks enrich the custard and whites form the stiff meringue topping.
Bread crumbs
Soaked in milk, they give the pudding body and a soft, moist texture.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, it adds richness and a tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the meringue topping stay stiff and browned.
Lemon
Juice provides acidity and the rind adds aromatic lemon flavour.

The step that matters

Brown the surface delicately. Egg white meringue sets and browns quickly at this heat, so it can over-colour or weep if left too long. Stiff whites and gentle browning keep the topping light and even.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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