Skip to main content
Dessert

Manchester Pudding

A sweet bread pudding with lemon curd and whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Manchester Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Pour the boiling milk over the bread crumbs and let it cool.

  2. Mix in the yolks of the eggs, butter, 1 oz. of sugar, and the lemon rind.

  3. Pour the mixture into a pie dish.

  4. Bake lightly.

  5. Let it cool.

Top and serve

  1. Whip the egg whites with 3 oz. of sugar.

  2. Gradually add the lemon juice to the whipped egg whites.

  3. Spread a layer of lemon curd over the pudding.

  4. Pour the whipped mixture on top of the lemon curd.

  5. Bake lightly.

  6. Serve cold.

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. Bread + milktop 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

Fine bread crumbs
Soak up the hot milk to form the soft body of the pudding.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and set the base; whites whip into a light topping.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender, moist texture.
Castor sugar
Sweetens the base and stabilises the whipped egg white topping.
Lemon curd
Adds a tart, sweet lemon layer that flavours the pudding.

The step that matters

Gradually add the lemon juice to the whipped egg whites.. Adding acid slowly and in small amounts keeps the whites from collapsing, so the topping stays light and holds its foam during baking.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes