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Dessert

Bread Pudding

Bread pudding made with sweet milk, bread crumbs, eggs, sugar, raisins, butter, and preserves or jelly, baked or served with custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Bread 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 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 crumbs in ½ quart of sweet milk until soft.

  2. Mash the soaked bread fine.

Make the pudding

  1. Add the remaining milk, well-beaten eggs, sugar, and raisins.

  2. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for one hour.

  3. Serve warm with a sauce or maple sugar hard sauce.

Alternative layered version

  1. Alternatively, slice and butter the bread, spread with preserves or jelly, and place in a baking dish.

  2. Make a custard by boiling 1 pint of sweet milk with 3 eggs and sugar to taste.

  3. Pour the custard over the bread and bake until brown.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk and form the soft body of the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set when baked, giving the pudding structure.
Sweet milk
Provides moisture and softens the bread, forming the custard base.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown during baking.
Raisins
Add pockets of sweetness and chew throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Mashing the soaked bread fine. Bread that is left in large pieces stays dry and uneven, while finely mashed crumbs absorb the milk evenly so the custard sets smoothly without dense or soggy patches.

Swap the raisin

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

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

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

More bread pudding recipes

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