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Individual Lemon Puddings

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Lemon and red currant work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 309 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Individual Lemon Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stir the lemon pudding mixture in a saucepan over medium heat until thick and pasty.

  2. Beat the egg yolks until light and stir them into the mixture.

  3. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold them into the mixture.

  4. Pour the mixture into cups or paper cases.

  5. If desired, top with a tablespoon of meringue before baking.

  6. Bake until golden, then add spots of red currant jelly on top.

  7. Serve immediately as they will fall quickly.

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. Lemon + red curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

  3. Egg + red curranttop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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

Swap the red currant

The recipe marks red currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, egg):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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