Skip to main content
Dessert

Black Bread Pudding

A steamed pudding made from grated black bread, milk, egg whites, dried fruit, lemon rind, spices, and salt.

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

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Black Bread Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderately hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the grated black bread, milk, dried currants or raisins, lemon rind, cinnamon, cloves, and salt well.

  2. Fold in the beaten egg whites gently.

  3. Oil a pudding pan and pour the mixture into it.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for 2.5 hours.

  2. Serve with vanilla or custard 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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Lemon + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Black bread
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the milk to become tender.
Egg whites
Beaten whites add lightness and help the pudding set as it cooks.
Milk
Moistens the bread so the pudding stays soft rather than dry.
Dried currants or raisins
Add pockets of concentrated sweetness and chewy texture.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air in the beaten whites. Stirring hard would deflate them, leaving a denser pudding that rises less during steaming.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes