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Semolina Pudding

Semolina pudding made with milk, lemon rind, sugar, eggs, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Semolina and lemon work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Semolina Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the semolina base

  1. Mix the semolina with a little of the milk until smooth.

  2. In a saucepan, bring the remaining milk to a boil with the sugar and lemon rind.

  3. Add the semolina mixture to the boiling milk and cook for 10 minutes.

  4. Remove the lemon rind and let the mixture cool.

Finish and bake

  1. Beat the eggs and mix them into the cooled semolina.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered pie dish and bake until golden.

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. Semolina + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together124 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Semolina + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together351 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Semolina
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the pudding a soft, set body.
Eggs
Bind the pudding and add richness and structure as they set during baking.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the semolina swells in and thickens.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Mixing the eggs into the cooled semolina. If the mixture is still very hot, the egg proteins can scramble instead of blending smoothly. Letting it cool first keeps the eggs smooth and lets them set evenly into the custard as it bakes.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against semolina, milk, sugar, 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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