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Dessert

Bread Pudding

A sweet pudding made from penny loaf crumbs soaked in milk, beaten eggs, rose water, nutmeg, and sugar, baked and served 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 custard base

  1. Cut the crumb of the penny loaf into very thin slices.

  2. Soak the bread in a quart of milk over a chafing dish of coals until the milk is absorbed.

  3. Add a piece of butter, stir, and let it cool.

  4. Alternatively, boil the milk and pour it over the bread, covering it tightly.

  5. Beat the yolks of six eggs and the whites of three with rose water, nutmeg, salt, and sugar.

  6. Mix everything well and place it in a cloth, tying it loosely to allow for swelling.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for one hour.

  2. Serve with melted butter poured over it.

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

Eggs
Yolks and whites bind the soaked bread and set into a firm, custard-like pudding when cooked.
Milk
Softens the bread and provides the liquid that the eggs set within.
Penny loaf
Forms the bulk of the pudding, absorbing the milk and egg mixture to hold its shape.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the pudding a smoother, more tender texture.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth loosely. The pudding swells as it cooks, so a tight cloth can restrict expansion and produce a dense, misshapen result. Loose tying leaves room for the rising mixture.

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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