Skip to main content
Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A baked lemon pudding made with bread crumbs, milk, butter, eggs, sugar, and lemon zest.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Lemon 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.

Make the custard base

  1. Pour hot milk over bread crumbs.

  2. Add butter.

  3. Let the mixture cool.

  4. Stir in beaten egg yolks and sugar.

  5. Add the lemon rind and mix well.

Bake and brown

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 1 hour and 15 minutes.

  2. Beat egg whites until stiff.

  3. Gradually add ½ cup sugar and lemon juice.

  4. Spread the egg white mixture on top.

  5. Brown in the oven.

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. Bread + eggtop 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

Bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and form the soft body of the pudding.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and enrich its texture as they set.
Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff foam that forms a light, browned topping.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender, smooth texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the meringue-style topping brown.

The step that matters

Browning the egg white topping. Stiff whites must be beaten fully and sugar added gradually so the foam holds its structure. Under-whipped or deflated whites will slump into the pudding instead of browning as a light, set layer.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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

More lemon pudding recipes

Baked 36Boiled 25Cold 13Sauce 9Steamed 8Cornstarch 6 See all 470 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes