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Dessert

An Excellent Lemon Pudding

A baked lemon pudding made with butter, sugar, eggs, lemon rind and juice, lined with puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

An Excellent Lemon Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Line a baking dish with thin puff pastry.

Make the filling

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together until well combined.

  2. Gradually add the egg yolks and mix well.

  3. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  4. Fold the egg whites into the butter mixture gently.

  5. Add the grated lemon rind and lemon juice slowly, stirring briskly.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into the prepared dish.

  2. Bake for 45 minutes in the preheated 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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  2. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Fresh butter
Creamed with sugar to give the pudding a rich, tender body.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help the filling set into a smooth custard.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks to lighten the mixture and give it a airy rise.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the butter cream to a smooth texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and sharpens the sweetness.

The step that matters

Fold the egg whites into the butter mixture gently. Whipped egg whites trap air that gives lift. Stirring them in vigorously knocks that air out, so the pudding bakes flatter and denser.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, 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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