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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A pudding made by layering stale bread with butter, currants, eggs, sugar, milk, and salt, then baking.

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: 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. Spread slices of stale bread thickly with butter.

  2. In a deep pudding dish, layer the bread and sprinkle in currants or raisins.

  3. Continue layering until the dish is two-thirds full.

Soak and bake

  1. In a bowl, whisk together eggs, sugar, milk, and 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 bread
Its dry, porous crumb soaks up the custard and sets into a soft, tender interior.
Eggs
Their proteins set when baked, giving the pudding its custard structure.
Milk
Provides the liquid that carries the custard and keeps the pudding moist.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the bread edges brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Letting the bread soak for 2 hours. The bread needs time to absorb the custard evenly; without it, dry patches stay under the surface and the pudding bakes unevenly.

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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