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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A lemon-flavored pudding made with butter, sugar, flour, lemon rind, breadcrumbs, eggs, lemon juice, and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Cream the butter until smooth.

  2. Stir in the sifted sugar and flour.

  3. Add the grated lemon rind and bread-crumbs.

  4. Beat in the eggs one at a time.

  5. Mix in the lemon juice combined with powdered sugar.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the mixture for one hour.

  2. Serve with German sauce.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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 and bind the mixture, giving the pudding its structure and richness.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, smooth texture.
Bread-crumbs
Add body and absorb liquid, giving the pudding a soft, moist crumb.
Lemon juice
Provides acidity and bright lemon flavour that balances the sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the lemon.
Flour
Thickens the mixture and adds structure to the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for one hour. Egg-thickened mixtures set through gentle, steady heat. If the heat is too fierce, the eggs can curdle or toughen, so the pudding texture suffers. Keep the cooking steady and watch the mixture throughout the hour.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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