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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A baked dessert made with layered bread, butter, jam, custard, sugar, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Bread and Butter Pudding

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 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.

Prepare

  1. Grease a pie dish.

Layer

  1. Layer slices of bread and butter in the bottom of the dish.

  2. Spread jam or marmalade over the bread, then sprinkle with sugar.

  3. Repeat layering until the dish is full.

Custard and bake

  1. Pour custard over the layers until the dish is filled.

  2. Grate nutmeg over the top.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 to 45 minutes.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Currant + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Slices of bread
Form the structure that soaks up custard and holds the layers together.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown lightly in the oven.
Custard
Sets during baking to bind the bread into a soft, creamy pudding.
Jam or marmalade
Adds sweetness and fruity acidity between the bread layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the layers and promotes browning on the surface.

The step that matters

Pour custard over the layers until the dish is filled. Bread must soak up the custard before and during baking. Pouring slowly lets the bread absorb it evenly, so the pudding sets creamy rather than leaving dry patches or pooled liquid.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, sugar, nutmeg, 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.

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