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Bread

Eye's Pudding

A sweet pudding made with bread, currants, sugar, eggs, salt, nutmeg, wine, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
By Home for the Friendless (Chicago, Ill.) · From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,398 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Eye's Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Take six eggs.

  2. Take six ounces of currants, well pared and chopped.

  3. Take six ounces of bread, discarding the crust.

  4. Crumb the remaining bread as finely as dust.

  5. Sort the stems from the six ounces of currants.

Make the mixture

  1. Add six ounces of sugar.

  2. Add some salt and some nutmeg.

  3. Add wine and butter.

Boil

  1. Boil for three hours without stirring.

Nutrition, whole recipe (rough)

566Calories
14 gProtein
2 gFat
124 gCarbs
What these numbers assume: 3 portions
IngredientPortion assumedkcal
Flour1 cup (125g) all-purpose455
Grape1/2 cup (76g)62
Sugar1 tbsp (12.5g) granulated49

One typical portion per ingredient; the recipe's quantities are not counted. A rough guide only, not for medical or dietary planning.

By Home for the Friendless (Chicago, Ill.). 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. See the original page.

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 + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

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

  2. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes
  3. Bread + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,638 recipes

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

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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 (in the method)
Set the pudding's structure as they cook, binding the bread and liquid together.
Bread
Provides the body of the pudding, soaking up liquid to form a soft crumb.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the eggs and butter.
Butter (in the method)
Adds fat, richness and a smoother mouthfeel to the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil for three hours without stirring. Stirring during a long boil would break up the bread and disturb the egg proteins as they set, leaving a coarser, uneven texture.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar. 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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