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Dessert

Bread Pudding with Cherry Sauce

A bread pudding made with stale bread, milk, butter, sugar, eggs, currants, and served with cherry sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Bread Pudding with Cherry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Soak the diced stale bread in warm milk for 4 to 5 hours.

  2. Squeeze out the excess milk and mash the bread with a spoon.

Bake and serve

  1. Mix in the butter, sugar, salt, egg yolks, currants, and rich milk or cream.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered tin mold or double boiler set in water.

  3. Cook for 1 hour.

  4. Turn out the pudding and serve with cherry sauce.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  5. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Its dry, porous crumb soaks up the milk and gives the pudding its body.
Milk
Softens the bread and supplies moisture so the pudding sets tender rather than dry.
Egg yolks
Coagulate when heated, binding the bread and custard into a sliceable, creamy set.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, tender mouthfeel.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds softness to its texture.
Currants
Add pockets of concentrated sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit flavour.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the excess milk. Bread that stays too wet will not set firmly, so the pudding can collapse or turn soggy. Removing surplus liquid while mashing keeps the texture cohesive.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, butter, sugar, 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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