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Dessert

Newmarket Pudding

A custard bread pudding made with milk, eggs, buttered bread, currants, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Newmarket 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.

Make the custard

  1. Bring 1 pint of milk to a boil in a saucepan with ½ lemon peel, a small piece of cinnamon, and 1 bay leaf. Boil gently for 5 to 10 minutes.

  2. Sweeten the milk with loaf sugar to taste.

  3. Beat together 5 egg yolks and 3 egg whites in a bowl until well combined.

  4. Add the milk mixture to the eggs, beat well, and strain through a fine sieve.

Assemble and bake

  1. Layer thinly sliced bread, butter, and currants in a pie dish until nearly full.

  2. Pour the custard over the layers and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Eggs
Yolks and whites set the custard and give it a rich, tender body as it bakes.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and gives it a soft, creamy texture.
Bread
Soaks up the custard to form the tender, layered body of the pudding.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the bread layers, helping them brown lightly in the oven.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness to the milk so the custard tastes balanced.

The step that matters

Straining the custard through a fine sieve. Straining removes egg strands and chalazae so the custard bakes smooth and evenly set instead of grainy or lumpy.

Swap the currant

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

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

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