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Dessert

Queen of Puddings

A bread pudding made with bread crumbs, milk, sugar, eggs, lemon, topped with jelly, meringue, and a lemon butter hard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Queen of Puddings

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 pudding

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

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

  3. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake until set.

  4. Spread a layer of jelly on top.

Top and brown

  1. Whip egg whites until stiff, then gradually add 5 tablespoons of sugar and lemon juice.

  2. Spread the meringue over the pudding and brown in the oven.

Make the hard sauce

  1. Beat together 1 cup of sugar, ½ cup of butter, and the grated rind and juice of 1 lemon until light and fluffy to make the hard 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. Milk + buttertop 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. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 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

Bread crumbs
Form the body of the pudding, soaking up milk to create a soft, set custard base.
Milk
Provides the liquid that moistens the crumbs and sets with the egg yolks into a custard.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set into a smooth, tender texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the meringue its stable, glossy structure.
Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that forms the light meringue topping, which browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Whipping the meringue. Egg whites must be whipped until stiff before sugar is added gradually, so the foam holds its shape and bakes into a stable, light topping rather than weeping or collapsing.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

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

  1. Vanillabetter flavor fit
  2. Figbetter flavor fit
  3. Peachabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Lemonthe original

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