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Bread Pudding

A custard-like dessert made by soaking bread in milk, eggs, and spices, then boiling and serving with melted butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Bread Pudding

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 ↓

Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Cut the bread into very thin slices and soak it in milk over low heat until it absorbs all the milk.

  2. Add butter, stir, and let it cool.

  3. Alternatively, boil the milk and pour it over the bread, covering it until it absorbs the milk.

Make the pudding

  1. Beat the egg yolks and whites with rose water, nutmeg, salt, and sugar.

  2. Mix the egg mixture with the soaked bread and milk well.

  3. Place the mixture in a cloth, tie it loosely, and boil for one hour.

Serve

  1. Serve with melted butter poured over the pudding.

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

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

  2. Rose + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Crumb of a penny loaf
Forms the body of the pudding as it soaks up the milk and sets.
Milk
Soaks into the bread to moisten it and sets with the eggs into a soft custard.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set, giving a rich texture.
Egg whites
Add structure and lightness, helping the pudding hold together as it sets.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to browning on the pudding's surface.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding in a loosely tied cloth. Egg proteins set as the pudding heats, so the water must boil steadily for the full hour. Tying the cloth loosely leaves room for the pudding to expand while it cooks.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Allspicefits less well
  4. Gingerfits less well

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