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Dessert

Baked Lemon Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with milk, lemon zest, flour, eggs, butter, and sugar, baked in a short pastry-lined dish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Baked 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.

Make the custard

  1. Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and gradually stir in the milk until the mixture boils.

  3. Stir in the grated lemon rind and sugar.

  4. Once cool, mix in the beaten eggs and juice of one lemon.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie dish lined with short pastry.

  2. Bake for about 30 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Set the custard as they cook, giving the pudding its body.
Flour
Thickens the milk mixture so the custard holds its shape.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth texture to the base.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Lemons
Provide aroma and acidity that give the pudding its flavour.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the eggs. Eggs added to a very hot mixture can scramble instead of blending smoothly, leaving a grainy custard. Cooling first lets the eggs mix in evenly and set gently in the oven.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, flour, egg, butter, 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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