Skip to main content
Dessert

bread-And-butter Pudding

A custard baked bread pudding with currants, eggs, milk, sugar, ratafia, and optional candied peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Wash and pick the currants, then sprinkle some on the bottom of a baking dish.

Assemble

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

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

  3. Repeat with two more layers of bread, custard, and currants, adding chopped candied peel if desired.

  4. Beat the eggs with milk, sugar, and ratafia, then pour over the layers.

Soak and bake

  1. Let it soak for 2 hours before baking 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
Set the custard as they cook, giving the pudding its firm, sliceable body.
Milk
Forms the liquid custard base that moistens the bread and carries the flavour.
Bread
Absorbs the custard during soaking and provides the structure of the layers.
Currants
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the layers.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps it brown lightly at the surface.

The step that matters

Soaking before baking. Letting the bread soak in the custard gives it time to absorb the liquid evenly, so the pudding bakes moist rather than with dry pockets of bread.

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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes