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Dessert

An Excellent Bread Pudding

A custard-like pudding made from bread crumbs, milk, butter, eggs, sugar, and lemon rind, baked and topped with fruit preserves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

An Excellent Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Pour 1 quart of milk over 1 cup of bread crumbs and let it stand until soft.

  2. Add 1 tablespoon of butter, grated lemon rind, 4 beaten egg yolks, and 1 cup of sugar.

  3. Bake in a pudding dish until set.

Top and brown

  1. Once cool, spread with jelly, preserves, or stewed fruit.

  2. Beat 4 egg whites with 1 tablespoon of powdered sugar until stiff, then add lemon flavor.

  3. Spread the meringue over the pudding.

  4. Return to the oven to brown.

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. Bread + milktop 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

Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk and form the soft body of the pudding.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the egg proteins set into a custard.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set and add richness.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps the top brown.
Butter
Adds fat for a richer, smoother texture.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar into a stiff meringue that holds its shape and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Bake the custard until just set. Egg proteins set with gentle heat. Overbaking tightens them too far, so the custard turns grainy, weeps liquid and loses its smoothness.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More bread pudding recipes

Apple 145Chocolate 53Brown 51Fruit 44Lemon 37Steamed 29 See all 1,021 →

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