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Dessert

Boiled Bread Pudding

A sweet pudding made from grated bread soaked in boiling milk, eggs, flour, butter, sugar, currants, almonds, and citrus zest.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pour boiling milk over grated bread and cover for 1 to 2 hours.

  2. Beat the soaked bread mixture until fine.

  3. Mix in the beaten eggs, flour, butter, sugar, currants, beaten almonds, orange-flower water, and zests.

  4. Butter a bowl that will hold the mixture. Flour a cloth.

Boil and serve

  1. Tie the cloth tightly over the bowl and place it in boiling water. Boil for 1 hour and serve with melted butter.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

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

  4. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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 help it set into a firm, sliceable pudding.
Grated white bread
Forms the main body of the pudding, soaking up milk to create a soft, tender crumb.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the pudding.
Flour
Thickens the mixture slightly, giving it body so it holds together when boiled.
Currants
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds to its soft, moist texture.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth over the bowl. The cloth must be tied tightly so boiling water cannot seep into the pudding and make it soggy, and so the pudding keeps its shape while cooking.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, flour, butter, sugar, almond. 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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