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Dessert

Boiled Bread Pudding

A boiled pudding made from stale bread, currants, eggs, sugar, milk, and flavored with peach or vanilla extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and peach work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 781 recipes. Both carry phellandrene, which smells minty. The science ↓

Boiled Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the stale loaf into slices.

  2. Layer two slices in a pudding mold, followed by half of the currants, then another layer of bread, and repeat until the mold is nearly full.

Make the custard

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs and sugar together.

  2. Stir in the cold milk and season with peach or vanilla extract.

  3. Pour the mixture over the bread layers and let it soak for 2 to 3 hours.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam the pudding for 2 hours.

  2. Serve with hot sweet 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. Milk + peachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together781 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

  2. Currant + peachtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Sugar + peachtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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

Stale bread loaf
Dry bread soaks up the custard and holds the pudding's structure as it sets.
Eggs
Set the custard as they cook, binding the pudding into a soft, sliceable texture.
Milk
Provides the liquid that soaks the bread and gives the custard its moist texture.
Fine white sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the eggs and milk.
Dry currants
Add pockets of chewy sweetness and fruitiness distributed through the layers.

The step that matters

Soaking the bread. The bread needs time to absorb the custard fully; if it is not soaked long enough, dry patches remain and the pudding sets unevenly once steamed.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, milk, peach. 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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