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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A custard-soaked bread pudding made with butter, currants, citrus peel, milk, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Bread and Butter Pudding

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Bread and Butter 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 and layer

  1. Spread butter on thin slices of bread.

  2. Layer the bread in a dish, sprinkling currants and a little chopped lemon or orange peel between the slices.

Make the custard

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs into the milk.

  2. Pour the milk mixture gently over the bread.

  3. Let it stand for 1 hour.

Bake

  1. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until set.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Thin slices of bread
Their porous structure soaks up the custard and forms the pudding's body.
Eggs
Their proteins set when heated, firming the custard.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the bread absorbs and the eggs set in.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the top brown in the oven.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and a chewy texture.

The step that matters

Baking until set. As the egg-milk mixture heats, the egg proteins coagulate and the custard firms. Overbaking makes the eggs tighten and weep, leaving the pudding grainy, so take it out once just set.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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