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Dessert

Fruit Bread Pudding

A sweet pudding made from soaked bread crumbs, milk, eggs, suet, raisins, and spices, baked in a buttered mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Fruit Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in milk.

  2. Beat in sugar, eggs, suet, salt, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

  3. Stir cream of tartar into the dry bread crumbs.

  4. Whip the mixture until light.

  5. Add raisins, sultana raisins, and citron.

  6. Add the baking soda mixture. Beat well.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour into a buttered mold.

  2. Boil for 2 hours, keeping the water boiling hard.

  3. Serve with 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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

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

  3. Nutmeg + raisintop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  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

Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk to form the body of the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm when cooked.
Milk
Moistens the bread crumbs and gives the pudding its custard-like texture.
Raisins
Add sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Baking soda
Reacts with the cream of tartar to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Cream of tartar
Acidic component that reacts with the baking soda to help the pudding rise.

The step that matters

Keep the water boiling hard during steaming. If the water drops below a boil, the pudding cooks unevenly and may turn out heavy and wet. Steady heat keeps the mixture cooking through and rising.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, sugar, egg, nutmeg, cinnamon, cream. 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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