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Dessert

Boiled Bread Pudding

A boiled pudding made from milk-soaked breadcrumbs, eggs, currants, sugar, butter, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Boiled Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard base

  1. Bring the milk to a boil and pour it over the breadcrumbs.

  2. Let it cool.

  3. Add the sugar, beaten eggs, and washed, picked, and dried currants.

  4. Mix well and pour into a buttered basin.

Boil and serve

  1. Tie it tightly with a cloth.

  2. Plunge the basin into boiling water and boil for 2 hours.

  3. Turn out of the basin and serve with sifted sugar.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 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. Currant + nutmegtop 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
Bind the mixture and help it set into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Breadcrumbs
Soak up the hot milk and form the body of the pudding.
Milk
Softens the breadcrumbs and keeps the pudding moist as it cooks.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Tie the cloth tightly and keep the basin fully submerged while boiling. A loose cloth lets water seep in and make the pudding soggy, and if the water stops boiling the egg-thickened mixture cooks unevenly and may not set firmly.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, egg, butter, 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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