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Dessert

Bread Pudding

A baked pudding made from sliced bread, milk, eggs, and sugar, steamed and served with optional sauce and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Bread Pudding

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Grease a plain mold or basin with butter.

  2. Arrange raisins, currants, or dried cherries at the bottom and sides of the mold.

Assemble and steam

  1. Layer slices of cake or sweet cakes in the mold until about three-quarters full.

  2. In a bowl, mix milk, eggs, flour, brown sugar, and salt.

  3. Pour the mixture over the layered cake until absorbed.

  4. Steam the pudding on a plate until heated through.

Serve

  1. Serve with sweet sauce, and optionally sprinkle with cinnamon or top with marmalade and almonds.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Raisin + almondtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,781 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  5. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the custard and help set the soaked cake into a sliceable structure as it heats.
Milk
Provides the liquid that soaks into the cake and gives the pudding its moist, custardy texture.
Cake or sweet cakes
Forms the body of the pudding, absorbing the custard so it holds together when heated.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a caramel-like flavor to the custard.
Flour
Thickens the custard slightly so it holds its shape rather than running out.

The step that matters

Pour the mixture over the layered cake until absorbed. The cake must soak up the custard evenly before steaming. Dry pockets stay pale and crumbly, while over-soaked cake turns soggy and loses its shape when heated.

“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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