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Dessert

French Pudding

A custard-like bread pudding made with soaked bread, eggs, milk, and orange flavor, topped with a sweet orange sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter 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 ↓

French 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 bread

  1. Soak the bread in cold water, weighted down to keep it submerged.

  2. Once soaked, squeeze the bread until dry.

Make and bake the pudding

  1. In a bowl, combine the moistened bread, beaten eggs, salt, and milk.

  2. Pour the mixture into a well-buttered pan and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 40 minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, boil sugar and cold water in a saucepan.

  2. Mix cornstarch with a little cold water, then add to the boiling mixture.

  3. Cook until thickened, then remove from heat and stir in orange rind, juice, and butter.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Milk + buttertop 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. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the custard as it bakes.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set as it bakes, giving the pudding its structure.
Milk
Makes the custard liquid that moistens the bread and softens the texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and helps give it body when cooked.
Cornstarch
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the boiling sugar syrup.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce, giving it a smooth finish.

The step that matters

Cook the sauce until thickened. Cornstarch must be added to a boiling mixture and cooked until it thickens; undercooked starch leaves the sauce thin and gives a raw, chalky taste.

Swap the orange

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

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

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