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Dessert

Christmas Bread Pudding

A moist bread pudding made with prunes, raisins, currants, nuts, sugar, citron, spices, bread crumbs, butter, eggs, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Christmas Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit and nuts

  1. Soak the prunes, then stew until tender, remove pits, and chop finely.

  2. Stew the raisins and currants, then chop finely.

  3. Chop the walnuts or almonds.

Make and cook the pudding

  1. In a bowl, mix the prunes, raisins, currants, walnuts or almonds, sugar, citron, cinnamon, salt, bread crumbs, butter, cloves, and nutmeg.

  2. Add the beaten eggs and enough milk to hold the mixture together.

  3. Steam or bake the pudding.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

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

  3. Walnut + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

  5. Walnut + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as the pudding cooks.
Bread crumbs
Provide the bulk and absorb moisture to form the pudding's body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, softening the crumb and carrying flavor.
Prunes
Add moisture, sweetness and a dense, soft texture once stewed and chopped.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning when the pudding is baked.

The step that matters

Adding the milk. Milk must be added gradually, only as much as needed to hold the mixture together. Too much makes the bread crumbs soggy and the pudding loose, while too little leaves it crumbly and unable to set.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (raisin, walnut, sugar, cinnamon, bread, butter, clove):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against raisin, walnut, sugar, cinnamon, bread, butter, clove. 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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