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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A lemon pudding made with grated Naples biscuits, powdered sugar, lemon rinds, butter, cream, eggs, nutmeg, and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 368 recipes. Both carry maltol, which smells caramel, sweet. The science ↓

Lemon 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.

Prepare

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

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, combine the grated biscuits, powdered sugar, grated lemon rinds, and lemon juice.

  2. Add the melted butter, cream, egg yolks, egg whites, and grated nutmeg. Mix well.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a dish lined with puff pastry.

  2. Sprinkle a little fine sugar on top.

  3. Bake for 30 minutes.

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. Biscuit + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together368 recipes

    Shared aroma: maltol (caramel, sweet).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Biscuit + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together697 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg yolks and whites set the custard and give it a rich, tender structure.
Butter
Melted butter adds fat for richness and a smooth, moist crumb.
Cream
Cream adds moisture and richness, making the filling softer and silkier.
Naples biscuits
Grated biscuits add body and absorb liquid, giving the filling its structure.
Powdered sugar
Sugar adds sweetness and helps the filling brown lightly in the oven.
Lemon juice
Lemon juice adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, sugar, butter, cream, egg, nutmeg. 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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