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Dessert

Marie Puddings

A steamed pudding made with egg, milk, sugar, lemon, arrowroot, and decorated with glacé cherries, served with a lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and arrowroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Marie Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cups

  1. Mix the beaten egg and a little milk to form a stiff batter.

  2. Grease four or five cups.

  3. Decorate the bottoms of the cups with slices of glacé cherries.

  4. Half fill the cups with the batter.

Steam the puddings

  1. Place a sheet of paper in the bottom of a stewpan.

  2. Add boiling water to come halfway up the cups.

  3. Put the cups in the stewpan.

  4. Cover the cups with buttered paper.

  5. Steam the cups for 45 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. Simmer the remaining lemon peel in ½ pint of water for 10 minutes.

  2. Remove the peel from the water.

  3. Add the white sugar and lemon juice to the water.

  4. Mix the arrowroot with a little cold water.

  5. Pour the boiling syrup over the arrowroot mixture.

  6. Return the mixture to the saucepan with the butter.

  7. Boil the mixture.

  8. Pour the sauce around the puddings.

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. Lemon + arrowroottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg
Beaten with milk, it sets when steamed to give the pudding its structure.
Arrowroot
Starch that thickens the lemon syrup into a smooth, glossy sauce when boiled.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel.
White sugar
Sweetens the lemon syrup, balancing its acidity.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce after adding the arrowroot mixture. Arrowroot thickens only when heated to boiling, so the sauce must reach a full boil to set properly; under-heating leaves it thin.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Arrowrootthe original

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