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Dessert

Feench Bread Pudding

A custard-filled bread pudding with jam, butter, and a sweetened whipped egg white topping.

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 ↓

Feench 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 bread

  1. Butter small squares of bread and spread with jam or jelly.

  2. Place the squares in a buttered pudding dish, filling it halfway.

Make the custard and topping

  1. Prepare a custard using the egg yolks and pour it over the bread.

  2. Beat the egg whites until stiff, gradually adding powdered sugar.

  3. Fold in 1 tablespoon of the jam or jelly.

  4. Heap the mixture on top of the custard.

Bake

  1. Brown slightly in a 350°F (175°C) oven.

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

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

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard so it sets softly around the bread.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they give the topping a light, airy structure.
Bread
Soaks up the custard and forms the body of the pudding.
Jam or jelly
Adds sweetness and fruity flavor to the bread and the topping.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the meringue and helps it hold its stiff structure.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites until stiff. Egg whites need to be beaten until they form stiff peaks, and sugar added gradually, so the topping holds its shape and bakes into a light foam rather than collapsing into a runny layer.

“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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