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Dessert

Bread-and-butter Pudding

A custard-filled bread pudding with butter, currants, candied peel, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare and layer

  1. Butter a pie dish well.

  2. Strew the bottom with currants and candied peel.

  3. Layer thin slices of bread and butter with currants and candied peel until the dish is nearly full, ensuring currants are on top.

Bake

  1. Pour a custard made of sweetened milk and 2-3 beaten eggs over the layers.

  2. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for about 20 minutes.

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. Butter + breadtop 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

Eggs
Bind the custard and set it into a soft, sliceable pudding as it bakes.
Bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the custard as the layers stand.
Milk
Makes the custard that moistens the bread and cooks into a tender texture.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown lightly on the surface.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and chew scattered through the layers.

The step that matters

Layering the currants on top. Currants placed on top stay near the surface, where the heat browns and dries them slightly, so they are not left sunk in wet custard.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, 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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