Skip to main content
Dessert

Custard Bread Pudding

A custard bread pudding made with bread crumbs, milk, eggs, corn starch, baking soda, and flavoring, boiled until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Custard Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in the milk.

  2. Heat the mixture in a custard kettle until it boils.

  3. Add the corn starch mixed with cold milk and cook for one minute, then remove from heat.

  4. Beat until smooth and almost cold.

  5. Whip in the egg yolks and flavoring.

  6. Fold in the egg whites.

  7. Pour into a buttered mold.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for one and a half hours.

  2. Serve hot with sweet 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 + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  4. Bread + corntop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together547 recipes

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

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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
Egg yolks enrich and set the custard, while whipped whites lighten its texture.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and form the soft, bready body of the pudding.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the crumbs soak up and the eggs set into custard.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk mixture so the custard holds its shape.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg whites when the base is almost cold. Hot custard base can scramble the egg yolks and deflate the whipped whites, so cooling it first keeps the pudding light and smooth.

“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.

You might also like

Bread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesCorn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipes