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Dessert

Plain Bread Pudding

A custard-like pudding made from bread crumbs, milk, eggs, sugar, lemon peel, and optional cinnamon, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Plain Bread 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 ↓

Plain Bread 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. Pour boiling milk over bread crumbs and cover until cool.

  2. Mix in beaten eggs, sugar, lemon peel, and cinnamon if using.

  3. Pour mixture into a buttered dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.

  2. Serve with sweet 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.

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Eggs
Set the custard as they cook, giving the pudding its firm, sliceable structure.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and form the soft body of the pudding.
Milk
Softens the bread and forms the liquid that the eggs set into custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the custard brown lightly at the surface.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Eggs set as their proteins coagulate with heat. Pulling the pudding too early leaves it runny in the centre, while overbaking makes it dry and grainy.

Swap the cinnamon

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

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Cinnamonthe original
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

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