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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A baked pudding made with stale bread, butter, eggs, milk, sugar, currants, and seasoning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Bread and Butter 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 ↓

Bread and Butter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Slice the stale bread and spread each slice thickly with butter.

  2. In a deep pudding dish, cover the bottom with a layer of bread.

  3. Strew a few currants or stoned raisins over the bread.

  4. Add another layer of bread and repeat until the dish is two-thirds full.

Make the custard

  1. In a bowl, whisk together the eggs, sugar, milk, and seasoning.

  2. Pour the mixture over the bread in the dish and let it stand for 2 hours.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for 1.5 hours.

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the custard as it bakes.
Eggs
Set the custard so the pudding firms up into a sliceable structure.
Milk
Provides the liquid that carries the custard and keeps the pudding moist.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that coats the bread and softens its texture.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown in the oven.
Currants or raisins
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy texture between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Letting the custard stand before baking. Standing gives the stale bread time to absorb the egg and milk mixture. Dry or unsoaked bread in the middle of the dish can stay floury or separate from the custard during baking.

Swap the currant

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

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

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