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Dessert

Bread Pudding

A steamed bread pudding made with soaked bread, spices, chocolate, raisins, eggs, and brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Bread Pudding

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the bread in cold water, then wring it dry in a napkin.

Mix and cook

  1. In a bowl, mix the spices, chocolate, brown sugar, beaten eggs, chopped raisins, and baking powder.

  2. Add the soaked bread and vanilla, mixing well.

  3. Pour the mixture into a greased dish and steam for 1.5 hours.

  4. Serve with hard 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.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Clove + raisintop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the liquid and custard-like mixture.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during cooking to give the pudding its structure.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and molasses flavor, and helps keep the pudding moist.
Baking powder
Releases gas that lightens the texture so the pudding is less dense.
Raisins
Add chewy pockets of sweetness throughout the pudding.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, cinnamon, clove, allspice, chocolate, sugar, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, cinnamon, clove, allspice, chocolate, sugar, egg. 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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