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Dessert

Washington Pudding

A fried bread pudding made with dry bread, eggs, milk, sugar, nutmeg, and vanilla, served with hard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Washington Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut the dry bread into cubes, about ½ inch thick, and remove the crusts.

  2. Soak the bread cubes for several hours in a mixture of beaten egg yolks, milk, sugar, nutmeg, and vanilla.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat butter in a skillet or a deep pan of boiling fat.

  2. Fry the soaked bread cubes until golden brown, turning them as needed.

  3. Serve hot with a large lump of hard sauce on each serving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Nutmeg + vanillatop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Dry bread
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the custard mixture.
Eggs
Bind the soaking liquid and help set the custard around the bread.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the bread absorbs and gives the custard its moisture.
Butter
Fat for frying that promotes browning on the outside of the bread cubes.

The step that matters

Frying the soaked bread cubes. Soaked bread is fragile and can break or burn. Moderate heat and gentle turning let the outside brown while the custard inside sets.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Capersfits less well
  4. Clovefits less well

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

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