Name: Dumplings and Puddings
Ingredients: bread crumbs; fruit; 1 pint milk; stale cake (optional)

Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Dumplings and Puddings

Ingredients

bread crumbs
fruit
1 pint milk
stale cake (optional)

Directions

Assemble

Layer bread crumbs and fruit in a dish until full, finishing with a layer of crumbs.

Make the custard

Make a custard by mixing 1 pint of milk with eggs and sugar as for pies.

Bake and serve

Pour the custard over the top of the pudding.
Bake until the fruit is cooked.
For an improvement, use fine crumbed stale cake instead of bread.

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.

Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs: Form the bulk of the pudding and soak up the custard as it bakes.
Milk: Makes up the liquid base of the custard, giving the pudding its moisture.
Eggs (in the method): Set the custard as it bakes, giving the pudding a soft, sliceable body.
Sugar (in the method): Adds sweetness and helps the custard brown lightly on top.
Fruit: Adds flavour, moisture and sweetness between the layers of crumbs.

“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.