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Dessert

Boiled Bread Pudding

A boiled pudding made from soaked bread, milk, egg, sugar, suet, peel, and lemon rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Boiled Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the bread in sour milk until soft, then press out the milk, leaving the bread crumbly.

  2. Grease and sugar a 1‑pint basin.

  3. Wet and flour a cloth.

Make and boil the pudding

  1. Add sugar, salt, lemon rind, peel, and suet to the bread and mix well.

  2. Beat in the egg, place the mixture into the basin, and tie the cloth over it.

  3. Boil for 2 to 3 hours.

Serve

  1. Remove from the pot, take off the cloth, and turn onto a hot dish.

  2. Sprinkle with castor sugar.

  3. Nutmeg can be used for flavoring.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Bread
Forms the body of the pudding, absorbing the milk and holding its crumb structure.
Egg
Binds the mixture together so it holds its shape when boiled.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the pudding moist and rich in texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tang of the sour milk.
Sour milk
Softens the bread and adds a slight acidity to the pudding.

The step that matters

Pressing out the milk from the bread. If too much liquid stays in the bread, the pudding becomes soggy and heavy. Pressing leaves the bread crumbly so it can hold together and cook evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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