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Dessert

Bread-Pudding

A custard-like dessert made from soaked bread crumbs, milk, butter, sugar, eggs, nutmeg, and optional currants, served with white wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Bread-Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Soak the crumb of the penny loaf in boiling milk until cool.

  2. Beat the mixture until fine.

  3. Add butter and sugar.

  4. Grate in nutmeg.

  5. Mix in the eggs, beating for about 30 minutes.

  6. Optionally add currants before boiling.

  7. Tie the mixture in a cloth.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for 1 hour.

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

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

  2. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Currant + white winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together276 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Penny loaf crumb
Forms the bulk of the pudding and soaks up the milk to give it body.
Milk
Softens the bread crumb so it can be beaten into a smooth mixture.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender texture to the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set it as it cooks, giving a firm, sliceable structure.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and chew throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Mix in the eggs and beat for about 30 minutes. Beating the eggs into the mixture evenly distributes them so the pudding sets uniformly when boiled. Under-beaten eggs can leave pockets of uneven texture.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, sugar, nutmeg, egg, white wine, sauce):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, sugar, nutmeg, egg, white wine, sauce. 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.

More bread pudding recipes

Apple 145Chocolate 53Brown 51Fruit 44Lemon 37Steamed 29 See all 1,021 →

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