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Dessert

Queen of Puddings

A bread-crumb pudding topped with meringue and served with a hard sauce of brown sugar, butter, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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

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.

Make the custard

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Combine bread-crumbs, milk, sugar, egg yolks, and butter in a bowl and mix the mixture well.

  3. Bake until set, but do not let it become watery.

Top and brown

  1. Spread a layer of jelly on top.

  2. Whip egg whites until stiff in another bowl, then gradually add 5 tablespoons sugar and lemon juice to the egg whites.

  3. Spread the meringue over the pudding.

  4. Brown the meringue in the oven.

Make the hard sauce

  1. Beat together brown sugar, butter, lemon rind, and lemon juice until light.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread-crumbs
Form the body of the pudding, soaking up the milk and eggs to set into a soft base.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set when baked.
Milk
Provides the liquid that softens the bread-crumbs and forms the custard.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff foam, they form the meringue topping that browns in the oven.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and, dissolved into the whites, stabilises the meringue.

The step that matters

Bake until set, but do not let it become watery. Egg proteins set as the custard heats; overbaking squeezes out liquid and makes the base weep and turn grainy, while underbaking leaves it runny under the jelly and meringue.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, sugar, egg, butter, sauce):

  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 bread, milk, sugar, egg, butter, sauce. 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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