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Dessert

Steamed Bread Pudding

A steamed pudding made from stale bread, fat, butter, eggs, dried fruit, and spices, served with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Steamed Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Soak stale bread in cold water.

  2. Press out the excess water.

  3. Stir until smooth.

Make the mixture

  1. Melt ½ cup fat and ¼ cup butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Mix the soaked bread with the melted fat and butter.

  3. Stir until it loosens from the saucepan.

  4. Cool slightly.

  5. Add mace, nutmeg, lemon rind, or cinnamon.

  6. Add salt.

  7. Incorporate several beaten eggs.

  8. Add finely cut dried fruit.

  9. Mix well.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam the mixture for 1 to 1.5 hours.

  2. Serve with lettuce and fruit sauce.

  3. Alternatively, use optional ingredients and serve with tomato or apple 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. Parsley + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Bread + tomatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  5. Mace + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,268 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up moisture and holding its shape when steamed.
Fat
Adds richness and a tender texture by coating the bread and carrying flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the bread mixture.
Several eggs
Bind the mixture and set when steamed, giving the pudding its firm structure.
Finely cut dried fruit
Adds sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Stir until it loosens from the saucepan. Cooking the bread with the melted fat drives off excess moisture so the mixture holds together. Adding eggs to a wet mixture can make the pudding heavy and dense when steamed.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, mace, egg, tomato):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Cinnamonfits about as well
  4. Thymefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, mace, egg, tomato. 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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