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Dessert

Madeira Pudding

A steamed bread pudding flavored with sherry and lemon rind, served with custard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Madeira Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the bread into dice.

  2. Place the diced bread in a bowl with the caster sugar.

  3. Heat the milk.

  4. Pour the heated milk over the beaten eggs.

  5. Add the sherry to the mixture.

  6. Pour the mixture over the diced bread. Mix well.

  7. Let it soak for 10 minutes.

  8. Grease a mold with clarified butter.

  9. Pour the mixture into the mold.

  10. Cover with buttered paper.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam for 2 hours.

  2. Turn out and serve with custard sauce.

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. Milk + buttertop 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. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Sherry + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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 soaks up the custard to set into a soft, tender crumb.
Eggs
Set during steaming to bind the pudding and give it a rich, custardy structure.
Milk
Adds moisture and dissolves the sugar, helping the bread soften into a creamy custard base.
Sherry
Adds aroma and a mild acidity that balances the sweetness of the pudding.
Caster sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps tenderize the custard as it sets.

The step that matters

Steam for 2 hours. Steaming gently at a steady low heat lets the egg custard set evenly without curdling or becoming rubbery. Too much heat makes the pudding dense and watery in places.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sugar, egg, sherry, milk, 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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