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Dessert

Baked Bread Pudding

A custard-like dessert made with bread crumbs, milk, butter, sugar, eggs, and lemon, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Baked 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

  1. Pour hot milk over bread crumbs and let cool slightly.

  2. Cream the butter and sugar together.

  3. Mix the creamed butter and sugar with the bread crumbs.

Make the custard

  1. Add the beaten eggs, salt, nutmeg or cinnamon, lemon juice, and lemon zest. Mix well.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 50 to 60 minutes.

  2. Serve with wine sauce, lemon sauce, cherry sauce, or any fruit 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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  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

Eggs
Beaten eggs bind the soaked crumbs and set into a tender, sliceable custard when baked.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the hot milk and form the body of the pudding, giving it its structure.
Milk
Softens the bread and provides the liquid that the eggs set in, keeping the pudding moist.
Butter
Creamed with sugar, adds richness and a soft, tender crumb to the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and, creamed with butter, helps give it a light texture.

The step that matters

Let the milk cool slightly before adding the eggs. Eggs added to very hot milk can scramble rather than blend smoothly, leaving a grainy custard. Letting the milk cool a little lets the eggs mix in evenly and set into a smooth texture when baked.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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