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Dessert

Bakewell Pudding

A layered dessert of ratafias, jam, and custard baked in puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 697 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Bakewell Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dish

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Line a pudding dish with puff pastry.

  3. Crumble the ratafias and layer them in the dish.

  4. Add a layer of jam, followed by another layer of ratafias, and another layer of jam.

Make and bake the custard

  1. In a bowl, mix the yolks of 4 eggs, 2 egg whites, lemon zest, lemon juice, and sugar to make custard.

  2. Pour the custard over the layered ingredients.

  3. Bake for 45 minutes until set and golden.

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. Biscuit + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together697 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Biscuit + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

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

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Eggs
Egg yolks and whites thicken the custard as it sets, giving the pudding its structure.
Ratafias
Crumbled ratafia biscuits soak up custard and add a crisp, almond-like sweetness.
Jam
Jam layers add sweetness and fruit flavour that seeps through the custard as it bakes.
Lemon zest
Zest adds bright aromatic oils that cut through the sweetness of the custard.

The step that matters

Baking the custard until just set. Egg proteins set as they heat, so underbaking leaves a runny centre while overbaking makes the custard grainy and watery as it pulls away from the pastry.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, 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.

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