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Dessert

Bread Pudding

A baked dessert made with bread, milk, eggs, raisins, and spices, topped with butter and meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Bread Pudding

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

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. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a saucepan, combine raisins and enough water to cover them, then boil the raisins for 5 to 10 minutes.

  3. Cut the raisins in halves.

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, mix sweet milk, bread, eggs, and sugar.

  2. Add the boiled raisins, vanilla, nutmeg, and cinnamon to the mixture.

  3. Place small pieces of butter on top of the mixture.

  4. Bake until set.

Top and serve

  1. Cover with meringue made from the reserved egg white and brown slightly in the oven.

  2. Serve with hard sauce or cream and sugar if desired.

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Vanilla + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  4. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  5. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard and add richness, with the reserved white whipped into meringue for topping.
Bread
Soaks up the milk and egg mixture, forming the soft body of the pudding.
Sweet milk
Provides the liquid that the bread absorbs and that the eggs set into custard.
Raisins
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Butter
Adds fat and richness as it melts over the top during baking.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Eggs set into a custard as their proteins coagulate with heat. Underbaking leaves the centre runny, while overbaking can make the custard grainy or weepy.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Peachfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, egg, sugar, vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon. 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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