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Dessert

French Bread Pudding

A custard-like pudding made by soaking sliced bread in milk, eggs, sugar, and currants, then baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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French Bread Pudding

Why it works: Milk and currant are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,475 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

French Bread 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 the custard base

  1. Boil the milk.

  2. Pour the boiling milk over the sliced bread.

  3. Let the mixture cool.

  4. Beat the eggs.

  5. Add the beaten eggs and sugar to the cooled milk mixture.

  6. Wash, pick, and flour the currants.

  7. Stir the currants into the mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish.

  2. Bake for 30 minutes at 350°F (175°C).

  3. Serve with or without 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.

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. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Bread (in the method)
Soaks up the hot milk and egg mixture, forming the soft body of the pudding.
Eggs
Set during baking to bind the pudding and give it a custard-like texture.
Milk
Provides the liquid that softens the bread and forms the custard with the eggs.
Currants
Add small pockets of chewy sweetness distributed through the pudding.

The step that matters

Let the milk mixture cool before adding the eggs. Adding beaten eggs to very hot milk can cook them unevenly and cause lumps, so the mixture should cool first to keep the custard smooth.

Swap the currant

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

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

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