Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Pudding

A baked bread pudding flavored with orange zest and juice, sweetened with sugar and enriched with eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Orange 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 batter

  1. Cover the bread crumbs with milk.

  2. Add the orange rind, juice, and beaten egg yolks.

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff, then add the sugar and mix well.

  4. Fold the egg white mixture into the bread crumb mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour into a buttered mold and place in a pan of hot water.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until firm.

  3. Serve with golden sauce.

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. Orange + milktop 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

Egg whites
Whipped to stiffness, they give the pudding a light, airy structure.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set firm when baked.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk and form the body of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps stabilize the whipped egg whites.

The step that matters

Folding the egg whites into the bread crumb mixture. Overmixing or stirring vigorously deflates the whipped egg whites, losing the airy lift that keeps the pudding light. Fold gently so the foam stays intact.

Swap the orange

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

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

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

You might also like