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Dessert

Baked Bread Pudding

A sweet pudding made from grated stale bread, milk, sugar, butter, lemon rind, egg yolks, topped with preserved pineapple and meringue.

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

Baked 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 the base

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

  2. Pour cold milk over the grated bread in a greased dish.

  3. Add white sugar, butter, lemon rind, and beaten egg yolks. Mix well.

  4. Bake until set, then cool.

Top and finish

  1. Spread preserved pineapple over the cooled pudding.

  2. Beat egg whites to stiff peaks, adding sugar and lemon juice.

  3. Spread meringue over the pudding and bake for a few minutes until just set, without browning.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Milk + pineappletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together885 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  5. Lemon + pineappletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Provides the body of the pudding, soaking up milk to form a soft, custardy crumb.
Milk
Supplies the liquid that soaks the bread and sets with the eggs into a custard.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set, giving it richness and a smooth, tender texture.
Egg whites
Whip into a stiff foam that forms the meringue topping, which sets to a light, airy layer.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender crumb in the baked base.

The step that matters

Bake the meringue only until just set. Meringue is egg white and sugar that turns tough and weeps or browns quickly with too much heat or time. Baking briefly keeps it light and tender.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

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