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Dessert

Bread and Custard Puddings

A custard pudding made by soaking stale bread in boiling milk, then baking with eggs, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Bread and Custard Puddings

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Soak the bread

  1. Pour boiling milk over the stale bread.

  2. Let the bread absorb the milk until it is cold.

Make the custard

  1. Beat the eggs separately.

  2. Mix the beaten eggs with the cooled bread and milk mixture.

  3. Add salt and sugar.

  4. Fold in the beaten egg whites last.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for one hour.

  3. Serve without sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Stale bread
Absorbs the hot milk and forms the soft, spoonable body of the pudding.
Eggs
Set when baked, binding the pudding and giving it structure and richness.
Milk
Supplies the liquid that softens the bread and moistens the baked custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the custard brown lightly during baking.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites last. Folding gently keeps the air whipped into the whites, which helps the pudding stay light. Stirring vigorously deflates the foam and makes the texture denser.

“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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