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Dessert

Lucy Stone's Bread Meringue

A sweet dessert made from bread crumbs, milk, sugar, eggs, and lemon, topped with a meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Lucy Stone's Bread Meringue

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 base

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

  2. In a bowl, combine bread crumbs, sweet milk, brown sugar, beaten egg yolks, grated lemon rind, and butter.

  3. Bake until the mixture is stiff.

Top and finish

  1. In another bowl, beat the egg whites to a froth and mix in powdered sugar and lemon juice.

  2. Pour the egg white mixture over the baked bread mixture.

  3. Return to the oven and brown lightly.

  4. Serve cold, with or without fruit or cream.

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
Form the bulk of the pudding and absorb the milk to give it body.
Egg yolks
Enrich the base and help it set into a custard-like texture.
Egg whites
Whipped to a froth, they form the light meringue topping that puffs and browns.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves readily into the whites, sweetening and stabilising the meringue.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the base and adds a caramel-like flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and helps stabilise the whites.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites to a froth. Whites must be whipped until frothy and then combined gently so they hold air. Under-beaten whites stay runny and sink into the base, while over-mixing can deflate them and make the topping weep.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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