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Dessert

Bread and Fruit Pudding

A steamed pudding made from stale bread crumbs, milk, butter, sugar, eggs, and fruit.

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 and Fruit Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the stale bread crumbs in the rich milk.

  2. Add the butter, sugar, salt, and spice to the mixture.

  3. Stir in the beaten eggs and the fruit.

  4. If using canned fruit, drain it and reserve the syrup for sauce.

  5. Adjust the sugar based on the sweetness of the fruit.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered pudding mold.

  2. Steam for 2 hours.

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. Milk + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and form the body of the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set it into a firm, sliceable custard as it cooks.
Rich milk
Softens the bread and provides moisture and richness for the custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, adjusted to suit the fruit.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the pudding.

The step that matters

Adjust the sugar based on the sweetness of the fruit. Fruit sweetness varies widely, and canned fruit may be sweeter because of its syrup. Tasting and adjusting sugar keeps the pudding balanced rather than cloying or flat.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Applethe 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.

More bread pudding recipes

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

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