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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A custard-soaked bread pudding with butter, currants, citrus, and a splash of ratafia.

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

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Bread and Butter 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

  1. Slice the bread and spread it with butter.

  2. Layer the bread in a dish, adding currants and slices of citron, orange, or lemon between each layer.

  3. In a bowl, mix milk, 2-3 eggs, a few pimentos, and a little ratafia.

  4. Pour the mixture over the layered bread to soak it, letting it stand at least 2 hours before baking.

  5. Optionally, make a paste around the edge of the dish for decoration.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until set.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the structure of the pudding and soaks up the custard as it sets.
Eggs
Set the milk mixture into a custard that holds the layers together.
Milk
Soaks into the bread and forms the custard base for the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that helps the bread brown lightly in the oven.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Soaking before baking. Letting the bread stand in the custard at least 2 hours lets it absorb the liquid evenly. Without soaking, dry patches stay in the pudding and the custard sets unevenly.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, orange, lemon, milk, egg. 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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