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Bread Puddings

Bread pudding made with stale bread crumbs, milk, butter, eggs, sugar, optional orange juice and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Bread Puddings

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.

Make the base

  1. Pour boiling milk over stale bread crumbs and cover for 10 minutes to allow the bread to swell.

  2. Beat the mixture well with a bit of butter.

Add the eggs

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs with a little sugar.

  2. Stir the egg mixture into the bread mixture.

  3. Add orange juice and currants if desired.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) or boil as preferred.

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. 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. Orange + curranttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 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

Stale bread crumbs
Form the body of the pudding and soak up the milk to become soft.
Milk
Softens the bread and gives the custard a moist, tender texture.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set as it cooks, giving the pudding its structure.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, contributing to a softer, more tender crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown during baking.

The step that matters

Soaking the bread in boiling milk. The bread must fully absorb the milk and swell before the eggs go in. Dry patches stay firm and do not blend into the custard, so the pudding bakes unevenly.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Orangethe original

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

More bread pudding recipes

Apple 145Chocolate 53Brown 51Fruit 44Lemon 37Steamed 29 See all 1,021 →

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