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Dessert

Baked Bread Pudding

A baked dessert made from soaked bread, milk, eggs, butter, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Baked Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pudding

  1. Soak broken pieces of bread in milk until soft.

  2. Add eggs, salt, butter, lemon peel, nutmeg or cinnamon, and sugar to the soaked bread, then mix well and pour into a baking dish.

Bake

  1. Bake at 400°F (200°C) 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.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Broken pieces of bread
Form the body of the pudding, soaking up the milk to create a soft, custardy base.
Milk
Soaks the bread and provides the liquid that sets into a custard as it bakes.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set it into a tender, sliceable custard when baked.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing to a softer texture and flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Soak the bread until soft. Bread that stays dry in pockets will not absorb the custard evenly, leaving uneven texture. Fully softened bread blends with the egg and milk so the pudding bakes into a uniform custard.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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