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Dessert

Light Brown Bread Pudding

A pudding made from stale brown bread crumbs, mutton suet, milk, eggs, and optional essences, steamed and served with wine or syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Light Brown Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Sift the bread crumbs into a basin and mix with the minced mutton suet.

  2. Boil the milk and sweeten it.

  3. Pour the milk over the crumbs and let them soak.

Make the custard mixture

  1. Beat the eggs, then strain the beaten eggs.

  2. Mix the strained eggs with the soaked crumbs.

  3. Add the essence if desired.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold.

  2. Steam for 1 hour.

  3. Serve with a glass of wine or thickened milk, or with syrup.

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

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

  3. Lemon + cherrytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Bread + muttontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,488 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Stale brown bread crumbs
Form the body of the pudding and absorb the soaking milk and egg.
Mutton suet
Adds fat and richness, keeping the pudding moist and tender as it steams.
Milk
Softens the crumbs and adds moisture, helping the mixture set into a tender pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set firm while steaming.

The step that matters

Soak the crumbs fully before combining. Crumbs that are still dry will not absorb the milk evenly, leaving dry pockets and a patchy texture. Letting them soak lets the starch swell so the eggs bind the mixture evenly.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, mutton, milk, egg, butter, wine, cherry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, mutton, milk, egg, butter, wine, cherry. 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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