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Dessert

Bread Pudding

Bread pudding made with bread crumbs, currants, milk, water, sugar, eggs, molasses, lemon, cinnamon, and allspice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Bread Pudding

Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

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.

Make the pudding

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in milk and enough water to soften them.

  2. Add lemon, cinnamon, allspice, molasses, currants, sugar, and the yolks of the eggs.

  3. Fold in the beaten egg whites.

Bake

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 20 minutes.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  2. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Sugar + molassestop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks enrich and bind the custard, while whipped whites lighten the texture as it bakes.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and water to form the soft, moist body of the pudding.
Milk
Softens the bread and adds moisture and richness to the custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown lightly in the oven.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites. Egg whites hold air only if they were beaten separately and folded in gently. Stirring them vigorously deflates the foam, so the pudding bakes denser instead of light.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, sugar, egg, molasses, lemon, cinnamon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, sugar, egg, molasses, lemon, cinnamon. 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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