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Dessert

Queen Pudding

A custard bread pudding topped with meringue, jelly, and served with cream or wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Queen 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.

Make the custard

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

  2. Combine bread crumbs, milk, sugar, butter, nutmeg or mace, lemon rind, and egg yolks in a bowl.

  3. Pour the mixture into a shallow square pan, about 2 inches deep.

  4. Bake until the custard is set.

Top with meringue

  1. While baking, prepare a meringue by beating egg whites and gradually adding powdered sugar.

  2. Spread some meringue over the pudding and mark it in squares.

  3. Using a piping bag, form a ring on each square with the remaining meringue and dust with sugar.

  4. Bake until the meringue is golden brown.

Finish and serve

  1. Fill each ring with jelly or fruit jam and cut the pudding into squares.

  2. Serve with cream or wine 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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Provide the body that soaks up milk and sets into a soft, tender custard.
Milk
Supplies liquid that, with the egg yolks, sets the custard.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set firm yet creamy when baked.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, more tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps the meringue stay glossy and stable.
Egg whites
Whip into a foam that forms the meringue topping and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Baking the meringue until golden brown. Meringue made with powdered sugar can weep or collapse if under-whipped or over-baked. Bake only until golden, since heat that is too high or too long makes it tough and sugary.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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