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Dessert

Boiled Bread Pudding

A sweet pudding made from crumbled bread, milk, sugar, butter, fruit, eggs, and spices, boiled until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,390 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Boiled Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a large pot, bring 1 quart of milk to a boil.

  2. Stir in the crumbled bread and mix until smooth.

  3. Add 1 cup sugar, ½ cup butter, salt, and the chopped fruit.

  4. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks and whites lightly.

  5. Mix in cinnamon and mace or nutmeg with the eggs.

  6. Combine the egg mixture with the pudding mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered tin.

  2. Place the tin in a kettle of boiling water, cover, and boil for 2 hours.

  3. To serve, run a knife around the edges and invert onto a serving dish.

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. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  2. Dates + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together283 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the custard and help set the pudding as it cooks.
Bread
Soaks up the hot milk to form the body of the pudding.
Milk
Supplies the liquid that softens the bread and sets into a custard with the eggs.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that keeps the pudding moist and tender.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds to its soft, moist texture.

Swap the dates

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Datesthe original

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

More bread pudding recipes

Apple 145Chocolate 53Brown 51Fruit 44Lemon 37Steamed 29 See all 1,021 →

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