Skip to main content
Dessert

Delicious Bread Pudding

A sweet bread pudding made with bread crumbs, milk, eggs, sugar, lemon, and butter, baked and topped with lemon juice and beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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 ↓

Delicious 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 custard base

  1. Dissolve the bread crumbs in the sweet milk.

  2. In a bowl, beat together the egg yolks, sugar, lemon rind, and butter.

  3. Combine the bread mixture with the egg mixture and pour into a pudding dish.

Bake and finish

  1. Place the pudding dish in a pan of water and bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 30 minutes, until thickened.

  2. Remove from the oven and squeeze the lemon juice over the top.

  3. Cover with beaten egg whites, sweetened and browned.

  4. Serve hot immediately before it falls.

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 + lemontop 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

Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk to form the body of the pudding.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as it bakes and enrich its texture.
Egg whites
Beaten and sweetened, they form a light topping that browns in the oven.
Sweet milk
Provides the liquid that sets with the eggs into a custard.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, tender crumb.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps the meringue topping brown.

The step that matters

Bake in a water bath until just thickened. Eggs set into a custard at moderate heat, and overbaking makes them curdle and weep. The surrounding water gently regulates the temperature, so the custard thickens evenly and stays smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, 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

Apple 145Chocolate 53Brown 51Fruit 44Lemon 37Steamed 29 See all 1,021 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipes