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Dessert

Favourite Pudding

A sweet pudding made from stale bread, raisins, dripping, milk, egg, and sugar, baked until set.

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 ↓

Favourite Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Grease a pie dish.

  2. Slice the bread and stone the raisins.

Assemble

  1. Lay the raisins in a ring at the bottom of the dish, with a few in the center.

  2. Spread the bread with the dripping and layer it in slices in the dish.

  3. Sprinkle the sugar and the rest of the raisins between the layers.

Bake

  1. Beat the egg until frothy, mix it with the milk, and pour it over the bread.

  2. Bake for 1 hour.

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. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Bread + raisintop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,111 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the custard as it bakes.
Egg
Sets the milk mixture into a custard that holds the bread together.
Milk
Forms the liquid custard that soaks into the bread and keeps it moist.
Dripping
Adds fat that enriches the flavor and helps the bread brown in the oven.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Pour the custard over the bread. The bread needs to be evenly soaked so the egg and milk can set into a custard. Beating the egg until frothy helps it blend smoothly with the milk, so the mixture soaks in evenly rather than pooling in patches.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

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