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Dessert

Bread Pudding

A baked dessert made from bread crumbs, milk, butter, sugar, eggs, and lemon, topped with a meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Bread 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 ↓

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.

Make the base

  1. Heat the milk and pour it over the bread crumbs.

  2. Add the butter.

  3. Cover to let it soften.

  4. Beat the sugar and yolks of the eggs.

  5. Add the beaten sugar and yolks to the mixture along with the grated lemon rind.

Bake and top

  1. Bake in a buttered dish at 350°F (175°C) until firm and slightly brown, about 30 to 45 minutes.

  2. Prepare a meringue with the egg whites, 4 tablespoons of sugar, and lemon juice.

  3. Cover the pudding with the meringue.

  4. Brown the meringue in the oven.

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. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks enrich and set the custard, while whites whipped into meringue give a light, airy topping.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the warm milk and butter to form the soft body of the pudding.
Milk
Hydrates the bread and forms the custard that sets as the pudding bakes.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, moist texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the meringue become glossy and stable.
Lemon
Juice adds acidity and rind adds bright aroma that cut the richness.

The step that matters

Browning the meringue in the oven. Whipped egg white meringue can weep or collapse if under-beaten or over-baked, and it browns quickly. Watching closely keeps it light, stable, and golden rather than dense or burnt.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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