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Dessert

Queen Pudding

A baked bread crumb pudding with lemon, sugar, eggs, and butter, topped with whipped egg whites and jelly, served cold with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 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.

Bake the base

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

  2. In a bowl, combine bread crumbs, milk, sugar, egg yolks, lemon rind, and butter, and mix well.

  3. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake until set but not watery.

Top and brown

  1. In another bowl, whip the egg whites until soft peaks form, then gradually add powdered sugar and lemon juice, beating until stiff peaks form.

  2. Spread a layer of jelly or raspberry jam over the baked pudding.

  3. Top with the whipped egg whites and return to the oven to brown slightly.

Serve

  1. Serve cold with cream.

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. Lemon + raspberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  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
Soak up the milk and form the soft body of the pudding.
Milk
Provides moisture and liquid for the custard base.
Egg yolks
Thicken and set the custard as it bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard base.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet meringue topping.

The step that matters

Bake the base until set but not watery. Egg yolks set as they heat, so underbaking leaves the custard runny and overbaking can curdle it and squeeze out liquid. Check that the centre is just firm before adding the topping.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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