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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A gelatin dessert flavored with lemon, bananas, oranges, walnuts, and grapes, served chilled with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gelatine base

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in cold water.

  2. Add boiling water and stir until dissolved.

  3. Mix in sugar and lemon juice.

Add fruit and set

  1. Fold in sliced bananas, small orange pieces, broken walnuts, and halved grapes.

  2. Refrigerate overnight.

Serve

  1. Serve with whipped cream.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Banana + grapetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together496 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Orange + grapetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

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

  4. Walnut + grapetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Banana + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a soft, sliceable body as it cools.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the sharpness of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and cuts the sweetness.
English walnuts
Add crunch and a contrasting texture to the soft set base.

The step that matters

Dissolve the gelatine fully before adding the sugar and lemon juice. Gelatine only sets when fully dissolved and evenly distributed. Undissolved granules leave soft or rubbery patches, and the set depends on the gelatine being hydrated in hot liquid first.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, banana, orange, grape, cream):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Hazelnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, banana, orange, grape, cream. 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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