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Dessert

Boiled Bread Pudding

A boiled pudding made from milk, bread crumbs, eggs, butter, currants, sugar, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Boiled Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Bring the milk to a boil and pour it over the bread crumbs. Let it cool.

Mix and boil

  1. Add the sugar, beaten eggs, butter, washed and dried currants, and nutmeg. Mix well.

  2. Pour into a buttered basin.

  3. Tie a cloth tightly over the basin.

  4. Place it in boiling water.

  5. Boil for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Turn out.

  2. Serve with sifted sugar.

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. Milk + breadtop 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. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and set it into a firm, sliceable pudding as they cook.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the hot milk and give the pudding its body and soft crumb.
Milk
Softens the crumbs and adds moisture so the pudding stays tender while boiling.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the pudding.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit through the pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth tightly over the basin. A loose cloth lets boiling water seep in, diluting the custard-like mixture and making the pudding soggy and heavy. A snug cover keeps water out and steam in, so the egg-thickened pudding sets evenly.

Swap the currant

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

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

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