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 Pudding
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the bread
Butter all the bread slices.
Spread half of the buttered bread slices with raspberry marmalade.
Top the marmalade-spread slices with the remaining buttered bread slices to form sandwiches.
Cut the sandwiches into 1-inch squares.
Make the custard
Heat the milk, remaining sugar, and butter in a saucepan until hot.
Mix the corn starch with a little cold milk, then stir the corn starch mixture into the hot milk mixture.
Cook the mixture until it boils for 2 minutes.
Remove the mixture from heat.
Beat the egg yolks and stir them into the mixture.
Return the mixture to heat until it thickens without boiling.
Pour the mixture into a pudding pan.
Stir in the nutmeg and brandy.
Beat the egg whites with 1 tablespoon of sugar until stiff, then fold them into the mixture.
Assemble and bake
Carefully add the bread squares, ensuring each piece is covered with custard.
Place the pudding pan in a larger pan of boiling water.
Bake for 20 minutes.
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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Spread + sugartop 10% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together260 recipes
Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
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Milk + corntop 10% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together6,955 recipes
Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).
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Bread + milktop 11% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together11,466 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Stale bread
- Soaks up the custard and forms the soft, set body of the pudding.
- Eggs
- Egg yolks thicken the custard and whites, folded in, lighten its texture.
- Butter
- Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and gives a tender crumb.
- Milk
- Forms the liquid base of the custard that sets around the bread.
- Corn starch
- Thickens the hot milk so the custard holds its body without becoming grainy.
- White granulated sugar
- Sweetens the custard and helps the whites hold their stiff structure.
The step that matters
Return the mixture to heat until it thickens without boiling. Egg yolks scramble and curdle if they get too hot, so the custard must be thickened gently. Heating only until it coats a spoon keeps it smooth.
Swap the raspberry
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, spread, milk, sugar, corn, egg):
- Vanillafits better
- Figfits better
- Coconutfits better
- Raspberrythe original
Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, spread, milk, sugar, corn, 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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