Name: Bread and Butter Pudding
Ingredients: stale bread, crusts removed; butter; stoned raisins; 2 large eggs; ½ cup brown sugar; ¼ teaspoon salt; 1 pint milk; cinnamon; nutmeg

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Bread and Butter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Butter thin slices of stale bread and remove the crusts.
Layer the bread in a pudding dish, alternating with layers of stoned raisins.
Sprinkle cinnamon and nutmeg over each layer of bread.

Make and bake

In a bowl, mix the eggs, brown sugar, salt, and milk until well combined.
Pour the egg mixture over the layered bread and raisins.
Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven for one hour.

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.

Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,917 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,390 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,377 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread: Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the custard as it bakes.
Eggs: Set the custard, giving the pudding its structure as it bakes.
Milk: Makes the custard liquid that soaks into the bread and sets softly.
Brown sugar: Adds sweetness and a molasses flavour to the custard.
Butter: Adds richness and helps the bread brown on the surface.
Stoned raisins: Add pockets of sweetness and chewy texture between the bread layers.

Swap the raisin

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

Vanillafits better
Figfits about as well
Raisinthe original
Lemonfits about as well

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