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Dessert

Baked Bread Pudding

A sweet pudding 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 the base

  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.

Bake and serve

  1. Add the beaten eggs, salt, nutmeg or cinnamon, lemon juice, and lemon rind, then mix well.

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

  3. 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
Bind the custard and help the pudding set as it bakes.
Bread crumbs
Form the body of the pudding and soak up the hot milk.
Milk
Provides the liquid that softens the crumbs and sets into a custard.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender texture to the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning on the surface.

The step that matters

Pour hot milk over bread crumbs and let cool slightly. The crumbs need to absorb the milk fully before mixing; if the milk is too hot when eggs are added, they may scramble, and if it is too cool the crumbs stay dry and the texture turns out uneven.

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.

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