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Dessert

Boiled Bread Pudding

A boiled pudding made from grated bread, milk, eggs, sugar, fruit, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Boiled Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Moisten the grated bread with milk and soak until soft.

  2. Add the eggs, sugar, fruit, and spices to the soaked bread.

  3. Boil the mixture for 2 to 3 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with 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.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Grated bread
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up milk to become soft and tender.
Milk
Softens the bread and provides moisture so the pudding stays tender.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set as it cooks, giving the pudding structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the flavor of the eggs and milk.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for 2 to 3 hours. Long, gentle cooking lets the eggs set the custard evenly through the bread. Cooking too hard or too fast can make the egg curdle and turn the texture grainy or rubbery.

“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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