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Dessert

Fried Bread Pudding

A dish of stale bread slices soaked in milk and eggs, fried until light brown, served with pudding sauce or syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 ↓

Fried Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut the stale bread into slices.

  2. Beat the eggs in a bowl. Stir in the milk.

  3. Dip each slice of bread into the milk and egg mixture.

  4. Layer the dipped slices on a dish and let them stand for 1 hour.

Fry and serve

  1. In a skillet, melt butter and fry the slices until they are light brown.

  2. Serve with pudding sauce or syrup.

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. 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. 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. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Stale bread
Dry, firmer bread soaks up the egg and milk without falling apart.
Eggs
Bind the soaking liquid and help the slices set and hold together when cooked.
Milk
Provides the moisture that the bread absorbs, keeping the slices soft inside.
Butter
Fat for frying that promotes browning and adds rich flavor to the crust.

The step that matters

Letting the dipped slices stand. Standing gives the bread time to absorb the egg and milk evenly. Slices that are fried too soon may stay wet in the center or fall apart in the pan.

“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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