Skip to main content
Dessert

Brown Bread Pudding

A sweet pudding made from stale brown bread, suet, currants, sugar, and eggs, boiled and served with wine sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Brown Bread Pudding

Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Brown Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mixture

  1. In a large bowl, combine the grated brown bread, chopped suet, currants, salt, sugar, grated nutmeg, candied peel, beaten eggs, and brandy, and mix thoroughly until well combined.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the mixture in a cloth and boil for 3.5 hours.

  2. Serve with wine sauce and, optionally, grated lemon rind for extra flavor.

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

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

  2. Currant + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

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

  4. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Nutmeg + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and set it into a firm, sliceable pudding as they cook.
Stale brown bread
Provides the bulk and structure that soaks up the other ingredients.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich as it steams.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the suet and brandy.

The step that matters

Boil in a cloth for the full time. The pudding needs sustained, gentle boiling so the eggs set and the suet melts through the crumbs. Cutting the time short leaves a soft, wet centre.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, currant, sugar, nutmeg, egg, brandy):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, currant, sugar, nutmeg, egg, brandy. 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 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipes