I felt like making pudding, so I dug around James Beard until I found a recipe that caught my eye. This one’s simple (mix all the ingredients together and put them in the oven) and delicious.

You will need:

• 3 egg yolks
• 3 tablespoons flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon melted butter
• 6 tablespoons lemon juice*
• 1 tablespoon grated lemon rind*
• 1 1/4 cups milk
• 3 egg whites

* I used lime juice. It worked great.

Preheat oven to 350 ºF. Stir together all the ingredients except the egg whites. Beat the egg whites until they form stiff peaks (more on that below), then mix the egg whites into the rest of the ingredients. Pour into a 9″ baking pan and bake until it’s set, about 35 minutes.

That’s it. It’s an easy pudding.

Zesting the limes.

This is what egg whites beaten to stiff peaks look like. The protein in the egg whites traps tiny air bubbles, which give the pudding its fluffiness. Isn’t science cool?

The finished product. It isn’t a very imposing-looking pudding, but it’s deliciously tart. You can get away with adding extra lime juice and cutting down the sugar if you like that sort of thing (I do!)