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Dessert

Small Bread Puddings

Small bread puddings made with milk, bread crumbs, eggs, butter, brandy, sugar, and lemon peel, baked in small cups.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Small Bread Puddings

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 custard

  1. Bring the milk to a boil.

  2. Pour the hot milk over the bread crumbs and let them soak for 30 minutes.

  3. Beat the eggs and mix them with the soaked bread crumbs and milk.

  4. Add the butter, brandy, sugar, and lemon-peel; stir until well combined.

Bake and serve

  1. Half fill buttered small cups with the mixture.

  2. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 20 to 30 minutes.

  3. Serve with a little white sugar.

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. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Hydrates the bread crumbs and forms the liquid base that sets into a custard.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the milk and provide the body that holds the pudding together.
Eggs
Set during baking to give the pudding its firm, custard-like structure.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing to a tender texture and flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 20 to 30 minutes. Eggs set as their proteins coagulate with heat, so baking too long can make the pudding curdled, dry, or rubbery. Check for a set centre and stop once it is firm.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, bread, egg, butter, brandy, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, bread, egg, butter, brandy, sugar. 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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