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Dessert

Fancy Pudding

A sweet bread pudding made with French bread, milk, eggs, sugar, cinnamon, fried and served with a sugar, wine, nutmeg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Fancy 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 ↓

Fancy Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Pour 1 ½ cups of milk over the sliced French bread.

Make the egg mixture

  1. In a bowl, mix the milk with 4 well beaten eggs, adding sugar and cinnamon to taste.

  2. Dip each slice of bread in the egg mixture.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry the dipped bread in lard or butter until golden brown.

  2. Serve with a sauce made of sugar, wine, and nutmeg.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

French bread
Provides the body of the pudding, soaking up the milk and egg to hold its shape.
Milk
Softens the bread and adds moisture to the custard.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set as it cooks, giving the pudding structure.
Lard or butter
Fat for frying that browns the coated bread and adds richness.

The step that matters

Frying the dipped bread. Bread soaked in egg can burn on the outside before the custard inside sets. Moderate heat lets the egg cook through as the surface turns golden brown.

Swap the cinnamon

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

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

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