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Dessert

German Pudding, Boiled

A boiled bread pudding made with milk, lemon rind, stale bread crumbs, butter, sugar, eggs, and jam or marmalade layers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

German Pudding, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the soaked bread

  1. Combine the lemon rind with the milk and let it sit for 30 minutes.

  2. Boil the milk, then pour it over the bread crumbs.

  3. Once cool, remove the lemon rind and beat the mixture with a fork.

  4. Add the butter, sugar, and beaten eggs, mixing well.

Assemble and cook

  1. Butter a round mold generously and layer the soaked bread mixture and jam or marmalade until full.

  2. Finish with a layer of soaked bread on top.

  3. Cover with buttered paper and place the mold in a pan to boil or steam for 1.5 hours.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set into a firm, sliceable pudding as it cooks.
Stale bread crumbs
Provide the body of the pudding, soaking up the hot milk to form a soft structure.
Milk
Softens the stale bread and adds moisture so the pudding stays tender.
Butter
Adds richness and a soft, tender texture to the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the tartness of the jam or marmalade.

The step that matters

Cooking the pudding by boiling or steaming. Steady, gentle heat around the covered mold lets the eggs set evenly without curdling or drying. Boiling the water too hard or letting it run dry can make the pudding uneven or scorched at the edges.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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