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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A lemon custard thickened with flour or cornstarch, topped with stiffened egg whites and browned before serving cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, cream together the sugar, butter, flour or cornstarch, egg yolks, lemon juice, and lemon rind.

  2. Stir in the boiling water and cook until thick.

  3. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish.

Top and serve

  1. Beat the egg whites with sugar until stiff, then spread over the top of the pudding.

  2. Brown the top slightly and serve cold.

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 + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Egg yolks
Enrich the custard, adding richness and helping it thicken as it cooks.
Flour or cornstarch
Thickens the mixture as it cooks, giving the pudding body.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to form a stiff meringue topping that browns lightly.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilise the beaten egg white topping.
Lemon juice and rind
Add bright acidity and aroma that define the lemon flavour.

The step that matters

Cooking the thickened base. The starch must be cooked until thick so it swells and sets the pudding; undercooked starch leaves a runny base that does not hold its shape.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, flour, egg. 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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Baked 36Boiled 25Cold 13Sauce 9Steamed 8Cornstarch 6 See all 470 →

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