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Dessert

Boiled Bread Pudding

A sweet pudding made by soaking dry bread in water, then cooking with eggs, sugar, raisins, and a butter‑sugar‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Soak the dry bread in warm water until soft.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, sugar, and raisins, and mix well.

  3. Boil in a bag or pudding mold for 1 to 2 hours.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, melt the butter in a saucepan, then stir in sugar and flour and gradually add boiling water.

  2. Flavor the sauce with lemon.

  3. Serve the pudding with the 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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Dry bread
Absorbs liquid and gives the pudding its body as it softens.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks.
Raisins
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce, giving it a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the pudding.

The step that matters

Gradually adding boiling water to the butter, sugar, and flour. Adding the liquid slowly while stirring keeps the flour from clumping, so the sauce thickens smoothly instead of becoming lumpy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, egg, sugar, raisin, butter, flour. 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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