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Dessert

Lemon Cream Pudding

A baked lemon custard topped with a lemon‑flavored cream and browned egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 Cream 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.

Make the pudding base

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

  2. Rub the butter into the sugar and beat with the egg yolks until creamy.

  3. Add the bread crumbs soaked in milk and mix well.

  4. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish and bake until set.

Make the lemon cream

  1. For the cream, combine 1 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon butter, 1 egg, lemon juice, and rind in a saucepan.

  2. Add boiling water and bring to a boil.

  3. Stir in the corn starch dissolved in water and cook until thickened.

Top and finish

  1. Beat the egg whites with a little sugar until stiff and spread on top of the pudding.

  2. Brown the top under the broiler briefly before serving.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Soak in milk to add body and a tender, moist crumb to the pudding.
Egg yolks
Enrich the base and help it set into a custard-like texture when baked.
Corn starch
Thickens the lemon cream so it becomes smooth and spoonable.
Egg whites
Beaten stiff to form a light meringue topping that browns under the broiler.
Lemon
Juice and rind supply sharp acidity and aroma that cut the sweetness.

The step that matters

Cooking the lemon cream. Cornstarch must be fully cooked after it is stirred in, or the cream stays thin and tastes starchy. Keep stirring as it comes to a boil so it thickens smoothly without lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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