Name: Bread-and-Butter Pudding
Ingredients: 9 slices of bread; butter; 1 handful of currants; 1 handful of sultanas; brown sugar; nutmeg (optional); 1 egg; ½ pint of milk

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 ↓

Bread-and-Butter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Butter the bread slices.
Wash and dry the currants and sultanas.
Layer bread in a pie dish, sprinkle with currants and a little brown sugar, and nutmeg if desired.
Repeat layers until the dish is full, avoiding currants on the top layer.
Beat the egg until frothy.
Gradually add the milk to the egg and pour it over the pudding.
Dot with small lumps of 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.

Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,662 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,997 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Swap the nutmeg

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

Cinnamonfits better
Nutmegthe original
Allspicefits less well
Clovefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, currant, sugar, egg, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.