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Dessert

Custard Bread Pudding

A custard bread pudding made with bread crumbs, milk, eggs, cornstarch, and flavored with salt and optional flavoring.

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

Custard Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard base

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in the milk.

  2. Heat the mixture in a saucepan until it boils.

  3. Add the cornstarch mixed with a little cold milk and cook for 1 minute.

  4. Remove from heat and beat until smooth and almost cool.

Finish the batter

  1. Whip in the egg yolks and flavoring.

  2. Fold in the egg whites.

  3. Pour into a buttered mold.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil for 1½ hours.

  2. Serve hot with sweet 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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Fine dry bread crumbs
Soak up the milk and form the body of the pudding.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that the bread and eggs set within.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and set the pudding, while folded whites lighten its texture.
Cornstarch
Thickens the milk mixture so the pudding holds together.

The step that matters

Let the mixture almost cool before whipping in the egg yolks. Eggs added to a very hot mixture can scramble and turn grainy. Beating until almost cool lets the yolks blend in smoothly and set evenly.

“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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