Skip to main content
Dessert

Newmarket Pudding

A custard‑filled bread pudding made with currants, milk, eggs, and flavored with lemon rind, bay leaf, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Newmarket 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.

Prepare

  1. Butter a pie dish and layer it with thin slices of bread.

  2. Sprinkle washed currants between the layers.

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, boil milk with lemon rind, bay leaf, or cinnamon for flavor.

  2. In a bowl, mix the yolks of 2 eggs, 1 egg white, and corn flour.

  3. Add the flavored milk to the egg mixture and sweeten to taste.

  4. Pour the custard over the bread layers.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until set and lightly browned.

  2. For a variation, spread marmalade on the bread instead of using currants.

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. 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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg yolks and white thicken the milk custard so it sets when baked.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, giving it a soft, creamy body.
Bread
Forms the layers that soak up the custard and hold the pudding's structure.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and fruit between the bread layers.
Corn flour
Stabilises the custard so it sets smoothly rather than curdling.

The step that matters

Pour the custard over the bread layers.. Egg proteins set with gentle heat, so the custard must be well mixed and the oven kept moderate; high heat can curdle it and make it grainy.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, milk, egg, corn, flour, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes