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Dessert

Bread and Butter Fudding

A custard-soaked bread pudding flavored with citrus, currants, and ratafia.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 Fudding

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble

  1. Slice the bread and spread it with butter.

  2. Layer the bread in a dish, adding currants between each layer.

  3. Add sliced citron, orange, or lemon for extra flavor.

Make the custard and soak

  1. Pour over an unboiled custard made from milk, 2-3 eggs, a few pimentos, and a little ratafia.

  2. Let it soak for at least 2 hours before baking.

Finish

  1. Optionally, use pastry around the edge for a nicer appearance.

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. 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 body of the pudding and absorbs the custard as it soaks.
Eggs
Set the custard into a soft, sliceable texture as the pudding bakes.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and keeps the pudding moist.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown lightly at the surface.
Currants
Add sweetness and pockets of fruit between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Let it soak for at least 2 hours before baking. The bread needs time to absorb the custard so the moisture spreads evenly. Baking too soon can leave dry bread and a loose, uneven custard.

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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