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Dessert

Very Plain Bread Pudding

A simple bread pudding made with soaked bread, sugar, currants, butter, and spices, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Very Plain Bread Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the bread

  1. Break the bread into small pieces and pour enough boiling water over them to soak well.

  2. Let the mixture stand until the water cools, then press out the water and mash the bread with a fork.

Mix and bake

  1. Measure the bread pulp and stir in salt, nutmeg, sugar, and currants in the specified proportions.

  2. Mix everything well and transfer to a well-buttered pie dish.

  3. Smooth the surface with the back of a spoon and place small pieces of butter on top.

  4. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) for 1½ hours and serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Nutmeg + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

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

  5. Currant + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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, soaking up liquid and setting into a soft, tender crumb.
Currants
Add pockets of chewy sweetness and fruitiness throughout the pudding.
Moist sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the surface brown during baking.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, keeping the top moist and promoting golden browning.

The step that matters

Pressing out the soaking water. Bread holds a large amount of water. If too much remains, the pudding will be soggy and may not set firmly in the oven, so the bread should be squeezed well before mixing.

Swap the currant

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

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

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