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Dessert

Bread and Butter

A custard-soaked bread pudding with currants or preserved fruit and a sweet wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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

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 the dish

  1. Cut thin slices of bread and butter them, removing the crust.

  2. Layer the bread in a dish, followed by a layer of currants or preserved fruit.

  3. Repeat layers until the dish is nearly full.

Make the custard and soak

  1. In a bowl, mix 1 quart of milk with 4 beaten eggs and 3 tablespoons of orange-flower or rose water.

  2. Sweeten the mixture with brown sugar to taste and pour it over the layered bread and fruit.

  3. Let it soak for 2 to 3 hours before baking.

Bake and make the sauce

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for nearly 1 hour.

  2. For the sauce, combine 1 cup of currant wine, 1 tablespoon of brown sugar, 3 tablespoons of water, and a walnut-sized piece of butter in a saucepan and stir until boiling hot.

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 + 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. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard as they cook, holding the soaked bread together in a firm, sliceable pudding.
Bread
Forms the structure that soaks up the custard and holds its shape while baking.
Milk
Provides the liquid base of the custard, keeping the pudding moist as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the bread brown lightly on its surface.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a caramel note to the custard and the sauce.

The step that matters

Soaking the bread. The bread needs time to absorb the custard fully; if it is baked too soon, dry patches remain and the custard may not set evenly through the dish.

Swap the orange

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

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

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