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Dessert

Bermuda Pudding

A lemon custard pudding made with milk, sugar, lemon peel, cornflour, custard powder, and baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Bermuda Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the rind of the lemon as thinly as possible.

  2. In a clean saucepan, combine the lemon peel and sugar with the milk and heat until it just begins to boil.

  3. In a bowl, mix the cornflour and custard powder with 4 tablespoons of cold milk until smooth.

Make the pudding

  1. Once the milk is boiling, add the cornflour and custard mixture.

  2. Simmer the mixture for 8 minutes, stirring gently.

  3. Pour the pudding into a mold and let it cool in a cool place 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the custard powder and cornflour thicken into a pudding.
Cornflour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells with heat, giving the pudding body.
Custard powder
Adds custard flavour and helps the pudding thicken and set as it cools.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavour of the milk and lemon.

The step that matters

Simmer the mixture for 8 minutes, stirring gently. Cornflour starch only thickens fully when heated enough to swell and gelatinise. Stirring gently keeps the pudding smooth and prevents it from scorching on the base of the pan.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, 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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