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Dessert

Boiled or Baked Bread Pudding

A steamed or baked pudding made from stale bread, suet, currants, raisins, egg, sugar, candied peel, ginger, nutmeg, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,324 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Boiled or Baked Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the bread in cold water for 30 minutes.

  2. Squeeze out the water.

  3. Clean the currants with flour.

  4. Stone the raisins.

  5. Chop the candied peel.

  6. Break the bread into pieces with a fork.

Mix and cook

  1. Mix the bread with all the dry ingredients.

  2. Beat the egg with a little milk.

  3. Mix the egg mixture into the other ingredients.

  4. Pour the mixture into a greased basin.

  5. Steam for 1.5 hours.

  6. Alternatively, pour the mixture into a greased pie dish.

  7. Bake, adding more milk if baking.

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. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  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 + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the milk and egg mixture.
Egg
Binds the mixture and sets it to a firm, sliceable texture as it cooks.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding rich and tender.
Currants or raisins
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of dried fruit.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds to its browning.

The step that matters

Squeeze out the water. Bread soaked in water holds a lot of liquid. Removing the excess keeps the mixture from turning soggy and dense, so the milk and egg can be absorbed properly and the pudding holds its shape.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, egg, sugar, ginger, nutmeg, milk):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, egg, sugar, ginger, nutmeg, milk. 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 →

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