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Dessert

Bread Pudding

A baked or boiled pudding made from bread crumbs, milk, lemon peel, spices, eggs, and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Bread Pudding

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Bread 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.

Make the custard base

  1. In a saucepan, combine bread crumbs, milk, lemon peel, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

  2. Boil for about 10 minutes.

  3. Sweeten with powdered sugar to taste.

  4. Remove the cinnamon stick and add the eggs.

  5. Beat the mixture well and pour into a baking dish.

Bake

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  2. Alternatively, boil for slightly more than 1 hour.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 crumbs
Form the body of the pudding, soaking up milk to create a soft, absorbent base.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during cooking to give the pudding its firm, custardy texture.
Milk
Soaks the bread crumbs and provides moisture that becomes a creamy custard as it cooks.
Powdered loaf sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the richness of the milk and eggs.

The step that matters

Beat the mixture well and pour into a baking dish. Eggs must be fully blended into the soaked crumbs so the proteins set evenly during baking; unmixed pockets of egg can leave the pudding unevenly textured.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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