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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A custard‑filled bread pudding with cinnamon, bay leaves, currants, lemon peel, nutmeg, and brandy, baked in a puff pastry rim.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Bread and Butter Pudding

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg 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 ↓

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.

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk with cinnamon and bay leaves for 1-2 minutes.

  2. Beat the eggs with sugar in a bowl.

  3. Pour the boiling milk into the egg mixture and mix well.

  4. Let the mixture cool, then strain it and add brandy.

Assemble and bake

  1. Layer slices of buttered bread in a dish, sprinkling currants and grated lemon peel and nutmeg between layers.

  2. Pour enough custard over the layers to cover them.

  3. Repeat layering until the dish is full.

  4. Bake with a rim of puff pastry around the edge at 350°F (175°C) 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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Brandy + curranttop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  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 set it firm as it bakes.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, keeping the bread moist.
French roll
Soaks up the custard and forms the body of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and aids browning on the surface.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy texture between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Egg proteins coagulate as the custard heats, so the pudding firms when it reaches a set point. Pulling it too early leaves a runny custard; baking too long can make it curdled and rubbery.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon, egg, sugar, brandy, lemon, nutmeg. 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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