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Dessert

Another Way to Make Bread Pudding

A custard-like dessert made with bread crumbs, butter, milk, eggs, sugar, and lemon peel or cinnamon, baked and served with sweet sauce.

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 ↓

Another Way to Make Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Pour boiling milk over bread crumbs and butter.

  2. Cover until cold.

  3. Mix in beaten eggs, sugar, and lemon peel or cinnamon.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a buttered dish until set.

  2. Serve with sweet sauce.

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. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  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

Eggs
Set the pudding into a soft, sliceable custard as they cook.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk and form the body of the pudding.
Milk
Softens the crumbs and provides the liquid that the eggs set in.
Butter
Adds richness and a silkier mouthfeel to the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavor of the eggs and milk.

The step that matters

Bake in a buttered dish until set. Eggs set between about 160 and 180°F, so pulling the pudding too early leaves it runny, while overbaking makes it dry and rubbery. Watch for a center that barely wobbles.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More bread pudding recipes

Apple 145Chocolate 53Brown 51Fruit 44Lemon 37Steamed 29 See all 1,021 →

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