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Bread Pudding

A simple pudding made by soaking bread crumbs in boiling milk, then cooking with egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Bread Pudding

Why it works: Cinnamon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pour boiling milk over bread crumbs in a bowl.

  2. Let it cool, then add the beaten yolk of an egg.

Cook and flavor

  1. Boil in a basin for 20 minutes.

  2. For flavor, add cinnamon, bruised almond, or lemon peel if desired.

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. Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Moistens and softens the bread crumbs, creating the liquid base of the pudding.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and form the soft, spoonable body of the pudding.
Egg yolk
Binds the mixture and sets as it heats, adding richness and a custard-like texture.

The step that matters

Let the milk cool before adding the yolk. Egg yolk scrambles if it meets very hot liquid directly. Letting the milk and crumbs cool slightly lets the yolk blend in smoothly and then set gently during boiling.

Swap the cinnamon

The recipe marks cinnamon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, bread, egg, almond, lemon):

  1. Nutmegfits about as well
  2. Cinnamonthe original
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Tarragonfits less well

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

More bread pudding recipes

Apple 145Chocolate 53Brown 51Fruit 44Lemon 37Steamed 29 See all 1,021 →

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