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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Bread and Butter Pudding

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. 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.

Assemble

  1. Cut the stale loaf into slices and spread each slice thickly with butter.

  2. In a deep pudding dish, cover the bottom with a layer of bread. Strew a few currants or raisins over the bread. Add another layer of bread and repeat until the dish is two-thirds full.

Soak and bake

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

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

  3. 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale brick loaf
Forms the structure that soaks up the custard and holds its shape while baking.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown on the surface as it bakes.
Currants or raisins
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Eggs
Set the custard as they cook, giving the pudding its body.
White sugar
Sweetens the custard and adds to the browning of the top.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that moistens the bread.

The step that matters

Letting the bread soak before baking. The standing time lets the bread absorb the egg and milk mixture so the custard cooks evenly instead of leaving dry patches or a watery layer at the bottom.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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