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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A baked pudding made with bread crumbs, lemon juice, milk, eggs, and butter, topped with whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Melt the butter in a pudding dish.

Bake and brown

  1. Combine bread crumbs, sugar, lemon juice, lemon rind, milk, and egg yolks in the melted butter.

  2. Bake slowly for 20 minutes.

  3. Whip the egg whites with sugar and vanilla until stiff.

  4. Spread the whipped mixture on top of the pudding and brown it.

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. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  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. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Bread crumbs
Form the body of the pudding and soak up the milk and lemon juice.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard base and help it set as it bakes.
Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff foam that forms the light, browning topping.
Lemon juice and rind
Add acidity and bright lemon aroma that cut the sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps stabilise the whipped egg white foam.

The step that matters

Whip the egg whites until stiff. Egg whites need to form a stable foam to hold their shape on the pudding. Under-whipped whites will weep and deflate, while over-whipped whites turn dry and grainy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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