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Dessert

Cherries

A layered pudding of bread, butter, cherries, milk, eggs, and sugar baked in a water bath.

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 ↓

Cherries

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard

  1. Beat the eggs with the sugar.

  2. Stir the egg mixture into the milk.

Assemble

  1. Layer thin slices of bread and butter in a pudding dish.

  2. Pour a little of the milk mixture over the bread.

  3. Add a layer of stoned cherries.

  4. Repeat layers until the dish is full, finishing with a thick layer of buttered bread and butter.

  5. Cover with an upside-down dish and let soak for 1 hour.

Bake and serve

  1. Place in a pan of hot water in the oven, still covered, and bake for 1 hour.

  2. Uncover and let the top brown.

  3. Serve hot with sugar.

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. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 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
Set the custard and enrich the soaked bread as it bakes.
Milk
Forms the liquid that soaks the bread and becomes the custard.
Bread-and-butter
Forms the structure of the pudding, soaking up the custard as it bakes.
Stoned cherries
Add fruit flavour and moisture between the bread layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and the pudding.

The step that matters

Uncover and let the top brown. Baking covered in a water bath keeps the custard gentle and moist. Browning only happens once the cover is off, so the top needs watching to colour without overcooking the custard beneath.

“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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