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Dessert

Lemon Pudding

A baked lemon pudding topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

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.

Prepare the pudding

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

  2. In a bowl, combine the egg yolks, bread crumbs, 1 cup sugar, butter, milk, and grated lemon rind.

  3. Pour the mixture into a baking dish.

Make the meringue

  1. In another bowl, whip the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  2. Gently fold in the lemon juice and remaining sugar into the whipped egg whites.

  3. Spread the meringue over the pudding mixture.

Bake

  1. Bake for 30 minutes or until the top is lightly browned.

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. Butter + milktop 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. Egg + breadtop 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

Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set as it bakes.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk and give the pudding its body.
Milk
Provides the liquid that forms the custard base.
Egg whites
Whip into a foam that forms the light, airy meringue topping.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and stabilizes the whipped egg whites.

The step that matters

Whipping the egg whites to stiff peaks. Egg whites must be whipped until stiff and then folded gently so the foam keeps its air. Overmixing or any trace of fat or yolk can collapse the foam, leaving a dense, weepy meringue.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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