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Dessert

Broken-Bread Pudding

A baked pudding made from stale bread, milk, suet, eggs, raisins, currants, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,377 recipes. Both carry alpha-terpineol, which smells lilac, floral. The science ↓

Broken-Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Fill a large dish with stale bread pieces.

  2. Add enough milk to soak the bread.

  3. Mix in 3 tablespoons of minced kidney suet and 1 pinch of salt.

  4. Beat in 2-3 eggs.

  5. Stir in 1 cup each of stoned raisins and currants, along with a little nutmeg.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased pie dish.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 1.5 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. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

  2. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  3. Bread + milktop 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

Stale bread pieces
Form the body of the pudding and absorb the milk and eggs to set a soft, moist crumb.
Milk
Soaks into the bread and supplies the liquid that the eggs set into a custard.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during baking to give the pudding its structure.
Kidney suet
Adds fat that enriches the texture and keeps the pudding moist.
Raisins and currants
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of dried fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Soak the bread fully in milk. Bread that is only partly soaked stays dry in pockets, while over-soaked bread turns mushy and cannot hold its shape. Enough liquid lets the starch in the bread hydrate evenly so the eggs can set a uniform, moist crumb during baking.

Swap the currant

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

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

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