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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A baked custard bread pudding made with buttered bread, raisins, milk, eggs, sugar, and lemon rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Bread and Butter Pudding

Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Bread and Butter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Butter a mold and line it with stoned raisins.

  3. Layer the mold with slices of buttered bread.

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, mix milk, egg yolks, whole eggs, sugar, and lemon rind.

  2. Stir over low heat until the mixture thickens.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the custard over the bread layers, moistening each layer.

  2. Repeat the layering until the mold is full.

  3. Bake for 2 hours.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + milktop 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. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  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 custard as they cook, giving the pudding its firm, sliceable body.
Egg yolks
Add richness and smoothness to the custard, helping it thicken gently.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that soaks into the bread.
Bread
Absorbs the custard and provides the layered structure of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps it brown slightly at the surface.
Butter
Adds fat and flavour to the bread and keeps it from sticking to the mold.

The step that matters

Thicken the custard gently over low heat. Eggs set at moderate temperatures; high heat can scramble them and leave lumps, so stir over low heat only until the mixture thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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