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Dessert

Bread-and-butter Pudding

A custard-soaked bread pudding with currants, buttered bread, and optional candied citrus peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Bread-and-butter 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. Pick and wash the currants, then strew a few on the bottom of a baking dish.

  2. Cut thin slices of bread and butter, removing some crusts, and layer them in the dish.

Make the custard

  1. Make the custard by beating the eggs with milk, powdered sugar, and ratafia.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour some custard mixture over the bread and sprinkle with currants.

  2. Repeat with two more layers.

  3. Optionally, sprinkle chopped candied lemon or orange peel among the currants.

  4. Pour the custard over the layered bread and currants, ensuring it soaks in.

  5. Let it sit for 2 hours.

  6. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for about 45 minutes.

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 + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Currant + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten into the custard, they set during baking to give the pudding its body.
Bread
Forms the structure that soaks up the custard and holds the layers together.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, keeping the pudding moist as it bakes.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves easily into the milk and egg custard.
Currants
Add tart, chewy bursts of fruit flavour between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Letting the custard soak in before baking. Bread needs time to absorb the custard; if it bakes dry-centred, the layers stay soggy at the bottom and dry on top, and the egg may not set evenly.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (currant, bread, egg, milk, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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