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Dessert

An Excellent Lemon Pudding

A lemon custard baked in a pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

An Excellent Lemon Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Beat the yolks of the eggs in a bowl.

  2. Add the sugar and lemon zest and mix well.

  3. Peel and beat the lemon with its juice in a mortar.

  4. Combine the lemon mixture with the egg and sugar mixture.

  5. Mix in the warmed butter until smooth.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the pie crust in a shallow dish.

  2. Pour the mixture into the crust.

  3. Nick the edges of the crust.

  4. Bake until set.

  5. Turn the pudding out of the dish.

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 + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Set into a custard as they heat, giving the pudding its structure and richness.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and softens its texture against the sharp lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity and bright lemon flavour that cuts the richness of the yolks and butter.
Butter
Adds fat that enriches the filling and gives it a smooth, silky mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but too much heat makes them curdle and weep. Bake only until the centre is just set and it will firm as it cools.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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