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Dessert

Another Way to Make Bread Pudding

A custard-like pudding made from grated bread, milk, spices, lemon peel, sugar, eggs, and butter, boiled or baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Another Way to Make Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding base

  1. Combine grated bread and enough milk to cover it in a saucepan.

  2. Add grated nutmeg, cinnamon, and lemon peel.

  3. Boil for nearly 10 minutes.

  4. Sweeten with pounded sugar.

  5. Remove the lemon peel.

Cook and serve

  1. Mix in the beaten eggs and butter.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered basin or mold.

  3. Boil for 1 hour, or bake if preferred.

  4. 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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  4. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Grated bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up milk to give a soft, tender crumb.
Eggs
Bind the pudding and set as it cooks, giving it structure and a custard-like richness.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, more tender texture.
Milk
Softens the bread and provides moisture so the pudding cooks through evenly.

The step that matters

Boil for nearly 10 minutes. Soaking and heating the bread in milk softens it fully before the eggs go in. If the bread stays dry or lumpy, the finished pudding will have uneven texture.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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