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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A baked dessert made with buttered bread soaked in milk, eggs, and flavorings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Bread and Butter Pudding

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 ↓

Bread and Butter 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

  1. Spread butter on the sliced bread.

  2. Layer the bread in a dish, adding currants and sliced citron, orange, or lemon between layers.

Soak

  1. In a bowl, mix milk, eggs, pimentos, and ratafia.

  2. Pour the mixture over the layered bread and let it soak for at least 2 hours.

Bake

  1. Optionally, use pastry to line the edge of the dish before baking.

  2. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until set.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

  5. Currant + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard, binding the bread and liquid into a soft, sliceable pudding.
Milk
Provides the liquid that soaks into the bread and keeps the pudding moist.
Bread
Forms the body of the pudding and absorbs the custard as it soaks.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown lightly on the surface.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit through the layers.

The step that matters

Soaking the bread. Letting the bread soak for at least 2 hours allows the custard to penetrate evenly. Dry patches stay chewy, while over-saturated bread can turn heavy and wet once the eggs set in the oven.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Orangethe original

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