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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A custard‑filled bread pudding with currants, served with a currant wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Bread and Butter Pudding

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 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.

Assemble

  1. Layer slices of buttered bread in the bottom of a dish.

  2. Add a layer of currants or preserved fruit.

  3. Repeat layers until the dish is nearly full.

Soak and bake

  1. In a bowl, mix milk, beaten eggs, orange-flower or rose water, and brown sugar.

  2. Pour the mixture over the bread and butter layers.

  3. Let it soak for 2 to 3 hours before baking.

  4. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for nearly 1 hour.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, combine currant wine, brown sugar, water, and butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir until boiling hot and serve with the pudding.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + milktop 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. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the structure of the pudding and soaks up the custard as it bakes.
Eggs
Set the custard as they cook, giving the pudding its firm, sliceable body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and keeps the pudding moist.
Currants
Add pockets of sweet, chewy fruit distributed through the layers.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown lightly on the surface.

The step that matters

Let it soak before baking. Soaking gives the bread time to absorb the custard evenly. Without it, dry patches stay in the pudding and the custard can bake unevenly.

Swap the orange

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

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

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