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Dessert

Cherry Pudding

A sweet bread pudding made with bread crusts, milk, butter, eggs, sugar, cinnamon, and cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Cherry Pudding

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 ↓

Cherry 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 batter

  1. Scald the bread crusts or crackers in boiling milk.

  2. Add the butter, salt, and sugar, mixing well.

  3. Beat in the eggs one at a time.

  4. Stir in the ground cinnamon and stoned cherries.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake at 400°F (200°C) until set.

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.

  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. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crusts or soft crackers
Soak up the hot milk to form the soft, starchy body of the pudding.
Eggs
Set when baked, giving the pudding its structure and custard-like texture.
Milk
Softens the bread and keeps the pudding moist during baking.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the cherries.
Stoned cherries
Provide fruit flavour and moisture, with some acidity against the sweetness.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Baking until the eggs have just set gives a firm but tender pudding. Overbaking causes the egg proteins to tighten, making the texture dry and rubbery.

Swap the cinnamon

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

  1. Cinnamonthe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

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