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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A custard-soaked bread dessert baked with butter, currants, powdered sugar, and preserves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Bread and Butter Pudding

Why it works: Milk and bread 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.

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk with sugar.

  2. Beat the egg into the milk and heat until thickened.

  3. Butter the slices of bread and soak them in the custard for 1–2 hours.

Assemble and bake

  1. Layer the soaked bread in a dish, sprinkling currants and powdered sugar between layers.

  2. Top with preserves and pour over the mixture of milk and beaten eggs.

  3. Bake at 350 °F (175 °C) for 20 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  3. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

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

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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 bind the pudding into a sliceable, tender texture when baked.
Milk
Forms the custard base that soaks into the bread and gives the pudding its moisture.
Bread
Absorbs the custard and forms the soft, layered body of the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the custard brown lightly in the oven.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy texture between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Heat the egg into the milk until thickened. Egg proteins set when heated, but if the custard gets too hot or is heated too fast, the egg scrambles into lumps instead of thickening smoothly, which spoils the texture of the soaked bread.

Swap the currant

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

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

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