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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A baked dessert made with bread, butter, currants, and custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Bread and Butter Pudding

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 ↓

Bread and Butter 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 the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Layer and soak

  1. Cover the bottom of a dish with thin slices of bread and butter.

  2. Add a layer of currants, then repeat the layers until the dish is full.

  3. Make a custard and pour it over the layered bread and currants.

  4. Let it stand to soak for a few minutes.

Bake

  1. Bake in the preheated oven 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. Bread + buttertop 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. Bread + curranttop 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

Thin slices of bread
Form the structure that the custard soaks into and sets around.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown lightly on the surface.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit between the bread layers.
Custard
Moistens the bread and sets in the oven to bind the pudding together.

The step that matters

Letting it stand to soak. The bread needs time to absorb the custard before baking. If it is baked too soon, dry patches stay unmoistened and the pudding sets unevenly.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, 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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