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Dessert

Baked Bread Pudding

A baked pudding made from bread scraps, sugar, currants, suet, egg, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Baked Bread 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 the bread and fruit

  1. Cut the bread into small pieces and soak in cold water until soft.

  2. Press out the water and beat the bread finely with a fork.

  3. Wash and dry the currants.

Mix and bake

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg and add it to the bread along with the currants, sugar, spice, and salt. Mix well.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a well-greased pie dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold, using dripping instead of suet if served cold.

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 + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Currant + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

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

  4. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

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

  5. Egg + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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

Bread scraps
Forms the bulk of the pudding, giving it a soft, moist crumb once soaked and beaten.
Egg
Binds the mixture together and helps it set as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown lightly in the oven.
Currants or sultanas
Add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness throughout the pudding.
Suet or dripping
Adds fat, which gives richness and a tender texture to the pudding.

The step that matters

Press out the water from the soaked bread. Excess water dilutes the egg and sugar and keeps the pudding wet and heavy. Squeezing the bread well lets the mixture set into a firm, moist crumb as it bakes.

Swap the currant

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

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

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