Skip to main content
Dessert

Excellent Bread Pudding

A sweet bread pudding made with bread crumbs, milk, eggs, sugar, lemon, butter, topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Excellent 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.

Make the pudding

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. In a large bowl, mix together the bread crumbs, milk, beaten egg yolks, sugar, lemon rind, and butter until well combined.

  3. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake until set.

  4. Once cool, spread with preserve or jelly.

Top and serve

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites with powdered sugar and lemon juice until soft peaks form.

  2. Brown the egg white mixture lightly under the broiler.

  3. Serve the bread pudding with whipped cream.

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

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

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

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Form the body of the pudding by soaking up the milk and custard.
Egg yolks
Bind the mixture and set into a tender, custard-like texture when baked.
Milk
Provides the liquid that moistens the crumbs and forms the custard.
Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that browns under the broiler for a light, crisp topping.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the topping brown lightly.
Butter
Adds richness and fat for a softer, more tender crumb.

The step that matters

Browning the egg white topping under the broiler. Egg whites whipped to soft peaks can deflate or over-brown quickly under high heat. Watch closely so the topping turns golden without burning or collapsing.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, sugar, butter, cream. 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 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipes