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Dessert

Boiled Bread Pudding

A boiled pudding made from stale bread crumbs, milk, eggs, suet, sugar, and ratafias.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Boiled Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Place the bread crumbs in a basin.

  2. Prepare ½ pint of boiling milk flavored with ratafia essence or lemon peel.

  3. Pour the milk over the crumbs and cover with a plate to let them absorb the milk and cool.

  4. Stir in the suet, salt, and crushed ratafias.

  5. Whisk the eggs with the sugar until dissolved, then add to the basin and mix thoroughly.

Steam and serve

  1. Transfer the mixture to a buttered basin, cover with buttered paper and a cloth, and tie securely.

  2. Boil for two hours.

  3. Serve with raspberry sauce or custard sauce flavored with ratafia or bay leaf.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Absorb the hot milk and form the soft, starchy body of the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during cooking to give it a firm, sliceable texture.
Suet
Adds richness and fat, keeping the pudding moist and tender as it cooks.
Milk
Softens the crumbs and provides moisture for a tender, custard-like crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the suet and eggs.

The step that matters

Letting the crumbs absorb the milk. Stale crumbs need time to soak up the hot milk fully; if they stay dry in places, the pudding will have pockets of raw starch and an uneven texture after boiling.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, 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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