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Dessert

Manchester Pudding

A bread pudding made with milk, butter, bread crumbs, eggs, lemon rind, sugar, raspberry jam, and short pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Manchester Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard

  1. Beat the milk.

  2. Pour the milk over the bread crumbs.

  3. Add the butter and sugar.

  4. Let it cool.

  5. Add one whole egg and the yolk of another.

Line and fill the dish

  1. Line a shallow pie dish with pastry.

  2. Prick the pastry with a fork.

  3. Spread raspberry jam on the pastry.

  4. Pour the mixture into the pastry.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake until the pudding is set, about 30 minutes.

  2. Whisk the egg white until stiff.

  3. Spread the stiff egg white roughly over the pudding.

  4. Sprinkle fine sugar over the top.

  5. Place in a cool oven for 10 to 20 minutes to 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.

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. Butter + breadtop 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. Lemon + raspberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Milk + raspberrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,014 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Provides liquid that softens the bread crumbs and forms the custard base.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk and give the custard body and structure as it sets.
Eggs
Set the custard when heated, giving it a tender, sliceable texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, softening the texture of the custard.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps the topping brown lightly.

The step that matters

Let the custard mixture cool before adding the eggs. Eggs scrambled by very hot liquid can curdle and lose their smooth set, so the mixture should cool first.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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