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Dessert

Bread and Fruit Pudding

A pudding made by layering stale bread with stewed fruit and sugar, then baking and serving with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 the basin

  1. Butter a pudding basin.

  2. Sprinkle some moist sugar over the basin.

  3. Line the basin with thick slices of stale bread, overlapping them.

  4. Place a round piece at the bottom.

Fill and set

  1. Stew the fruit with sugar until boiling.

  2. Pour the stewed fruit into the basin to fill it.

  3. Let it cool completely.

Turn out and serve

  1. Cover with a large plate and turn it out.

  2. Serve with powdered 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  2. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + breadtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the structure of the pudding, holding its shape once soaked and set.
Fruit
Provides moisture, sweetness and flavour to the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the stewed fruit and helps it thicken as it cooks down.
Butter
Greases the basin so the pudding releases cleanly when turned out.

The step that matters

Let it cool completely. The pudding needs to cool fully so the filling firms and the bread holds together; turning it out while warm can make it collapse.

“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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