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Dessert

Custard Pudding

A custard pudding made with currants, citron, buttered bread, eggs, milk, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Custard Pudding

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 ↓

Custard 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

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Grease your pan thoroughly with butter.

Assemble

  1. Layer a mixture of currants and citron alternately with thick slices of buttered bread until the pan is nearly full.

  2. Prepare the custard by whisking together eggs, milk, and sugar.

  3. Pour the custard mixture over the layered bread and fruit.

Bake

  1. Bake for 30 minutes or until set.

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 + 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
Set the custard and bind it into a tender, sliceable pudding.
Bread
Forms the structure that soaks up custard and holds the pudding together.
Milk
Dilutes the eggs and carries moisture so the custard stays soft when set.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the tartness of the currants and citron.
Currants
Add concentrated fruit flavour and chewy pockets throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Pour the custard mixture over the layered bread and fruit.. The bread needs time to absorb the custard evenly before baking. Pouring it in with the layers still dry can leave pockets of unsoaked bread and uneven setting.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread, egg, milk, 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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