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Custard Pudding

A custard bread pudding made with currants, citron, and thick slices of bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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. Butter your baking pan generously.

Assemble and bake

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

  2. Pour the prepared custard over the layered bread and fruit.

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Currant + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Thick slices of bread
Form the structure that the custard soaks into and sets around.
Custard
Sets during baking to bind the bread and fruit into a tender, creamy pudding.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.
Citron
Adds a tangy, aromatic citrus note that balances the custard's richness.

The step that matters

Baking until set. Custard sets as its egg proteins coagulate with heat. Pulling the pudding too early leaves it runny in the middle, while overbaking can make it curdled and rubbery.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, bread. 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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