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Dutch Pudding

A milk-based pudding made with bread, butter, eggs, sugar, and nutmeg, boiled for hours.

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 ↓

Dutch Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Boil the milk.

  2. Slice the bread and pour the milk over it.

  3. Cover and let it cool almost completely.

  4. Beat the mixture until fine.

Make and cook the pudding

  1. Add the butter, eggs, sugar, and nutmeg.

  2. Mix thoroughly and pour into a buttered mold.

  3. Boil for 2½ hours.

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Softens the bread and forms the liquid base of the pudding.
Bread
Absorbs the milk and gives the pudding its body.
Eggs
Set when heated, giving the pudding structure and firmness.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, tender texture.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the eggs and butter.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool almost completely before adding the eggs. Eggs scramble when added to very hot liquid. Cooling the milk and bread mixture first lets the eggs blend smoothly and set into an even custard-like texture during cooking.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Capersfits less well

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