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Dessert

Lemon or Orange Pudding

A baked pudding made with lemon or orange, sugar, butter, eggs, zest, juice, and decorated with pasta strips.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pasta match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 565 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Lemon or Orange 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.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Zest the lemon or Seville orange and squeeze out the juice and pulp.

  2. Boil the skin in several waters to remove the bitterness.

Make the mixture

  1. Beat the boiled skin with sugar and butter until smooth.

  2. Add the eggs, zest, and juice, and mix well.

  3. Pour the mixture into a greased baking dish.

Decorate and bake

  1. Decorate the top with fine strips of pasta and an ornament in the center.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.

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 + pastatop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. 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

Eggs
Set the custard into a firm, sliceable structure as they cook and coagulate.
Butter
Adds fat for a smooth, rich, tender texture in the mixture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the sharpness of the citrus.
Lemon or seville orange
Provides acidity and fragrant aroma from the juice and zest, and bitter flavor from the skin.

The step that matters

Boil the skin in several waters. The bitter compounds in citrus peel dissolve in water, so boiling in fresh water several times draws them out. Skipping or shortening this step leaves the pudding bitter.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Pumpkinfits less well
  4. Avocadofits less well

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