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 Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the base
Break up the bread.
Pour boiling milk over it and let it soak for a while.
Make the custard
Beat the eggs with the sugar.
Add the beaten eggs and sugar to the soaked bread and milk.
Mix in the butter.
Fill and cook
Pour the mixture into a pudding dish and bake.
Grease a bowl and dust with flour, add a few raisins or slices of candied peel, then pour in the mixture.
Place the bowl in boiling water and boil for 1.5 hours.
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.
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Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together27,232 recipes
Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
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Butter + milktop 7% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together81,283 recipes
Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
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Bread + milktop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together11,466 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
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Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together22,662 recipes
Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
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Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together118,967 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
- Bread
- Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the milk and egg to set into a soft crumb.
- Eggs
- Bind the mixture and set when cooked, giving the pudding its structure.
- Milk
- Soaks the bread and adds moisture, so the pudding stays soft rather than dry.
- Butter
- Adds richness and fat, giving a smoother, more tender texture.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness and helps the custard brown lightly during cooking.
The step that matters
Pour boiling milk over the bread and let it soak. Hot milk softens the bread quickly and evenly, so it absorbs the liquid before the eggs are added. Dry patches left unsoaked stay dense in the finished pudding.
“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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