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Dessert

Common Bread and Butter Pudding

A custard-soaked bread pudding with butter, milk, sugar, eggs, nutmeg, currants, and optional citrus zest or flower water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Common 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. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Sweeten the milk with the sugar.

  3. Stir the milk mixture into the beaten eggs and add the grated nutmeg.

Assemble and bake

  1. Layer slices of buttered bread in a dish, sprinkling currants between the layers.

  2. Pour the egg and milk mixture over the bread layers until nearly full.

  3. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, until set and golden.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  3. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Nutmeg + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard so the pudding holds its shape when baked.
Milk
Forms the liquid custard that soaks into the bread and moistens it.
Sugar
Sweetens the milk and adds flavour to the custard.
Bread (in the method)
Absorbs the custard and forms the body of the pudding.
Currants
Add pockets of chewy sweetness distributed between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Pour the egg and milk mixture over the bread layers until nearly full. Bread needs time to soak up the custard; pouring it all at once leaves dry bread on top and a runny base. Leaving a little room prevents overflow as the pudding rises during baking.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar, egg, nutmeg, currant):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, egg, nutmeg, currant. 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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