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Another Way to Make Bread Pudding

A custard-like pudding made by soaking bread crumbs in boiling milk, then baking with eggs, sugar, and lemon or cinnamon.

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 ↓

Another Way to Make Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Pour boiling milk over bread crumbs and butter.

  2. Cover and let it cool.

  3. Mix in beaten eggs, sugar, and lemon peel or cinnamon.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a buttered dish until set.

  2. Serve with a sweet sauce.

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

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

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

Bread crumbs
Soak up the milk and form the body of the pudding.
Eggs
Set when baked, giving the pudding its firm, sliceable structure.
Milk
Softens the crumbs and provides moisture for a tender custard texture.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fat-based mouthfeel.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown lightly at the surface.

The step that matters

Bake in a buttered dish until set. Egg proteins set with heat, so underbaking leaves the pudding loose while overbaking can make it dry and grainy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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