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Dessert

Amber Pudding

A baked pudding of cooked apples, butter, lemon, egg yolks and sugar, topped with a browned meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Amber Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Cook the apples, butter, lemon juice and lemon rind together until tender. Remove from heat.

  2. Stir in the beaten egg yolks.

  3. Pour the mixture into a pie crust.

Bake and top

  1. Bake until brown.

  2. Make a meringue from the beaten egg whites and sugar. Spread the meringue on top. Let it brown.

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. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Break down into a tender, sweet filling that forms the body of the pudding.
Egg yolks
Thicken the cooked apple mixture as they set, giving the filling a custard-like body.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form a meringue that puffs and browns on top.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the filling a smooth, rounded flavor and texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the meringue and helps it hold its shape and brown.

The step that matters

Stir in the beaten egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently. If the cooked apple mixture is too hot when they go in, they can scramble and leave the filling grainy, so let it cool slightly first.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, lemon, egg, sugar. 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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