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Dessert

Queen of Puddings

A rich custard pudding with butter, sugar, egg yolks, milk, bread crumbs, lemon rind, topped with jelly and beaten egg whites.

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 ↓

Queen of Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Blend the butter with the sugar and beat in the egg yolks.

  2. Add the bread crumbs absorbed in the milk and lemon rind.

  3. Pour into a buttered pudding mold and bake in a cooker oven between two hot discs for 25 minutes.

Top and finish

  1. When cool, cover with a layer of jelly.

  2. Beat the egg whites and add the pulverized sugar, then place on top of the jelly.

  3. Let it stand in the cooker under a heated disc for 3 minutes.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Enrich the custard base, adding richness and helping it set when baked.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk to form the body of the pudding.
Milk
Provides the liquid that sets with the eggs into a soft custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps tenderize the custard.
Egg whites
Beaten with sugar to form a meringue topping that browns lightly.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the base mixture.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites with sugar for the topping. Whites must be beaten until they hold stiff peaks and the sugar fully dissolved, or the meringue will weep or collapse on the jelly. Spreading it over the jelly and baking briefly sets the topping without overcooking the custard beneath.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

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

  1. Vanillabetter flavor fit
  2. Figbetter flavor fit
  3. Peachabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, sugar, milk, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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