Name: Another Way to Make Lemon Pudding
Ingredients: 3 lemons; 6 ounces loaf sugar, pounded (about ¾ cup); 4 tablespoons water; puff pastry for lining the tin

Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Another Way to Make Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

3 lemons
6 ounces loaf sugar, pounded (about ¾ cup)
4 tablespoons water
puff pastry for lining the tin

Directions

Prepare the lemons

Cut the lemons in half and squeeze out the juice.
Boil the lemon rinds in a large amount of water, changing the water twice with hot water each time.
Once the rinds are tender, cut them into thin strips about ½ inch long.

Make the filling and bake

Mix the lemon strips with the pounded sugar, water, and lemon juice.
Bake in a tin lined with puff pastry.

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.

Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Lemons: Supply the juice and rinds that give the pudding its bright, sharp lemon flavour.
Loaf sugar: Sweetens the filling and helps soften and preserve the candied-style lemon strips.
Puff pastry: Forms the lining of the tin, giving the pudding a crisp, flaky base as it bakes.

“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.