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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A baked dessert made with currants, bread, butter, eggs, sugar, nutmeg, and milk.

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

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

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. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Wash and pick the currants, then sprinkle a few at the bottom of a quart dish.

  3. Spread butter on the bread and cut it into thin layers.

Assemble

  1. Layer the bread in the dish, sprinkling currants between each layer.

  2. In a bowl, beat the eggs (excluding the reserved white) and mix in the sugar and nutmeg. Stir in the milk until well combined.

  3. Pour the egg mixture over the layered bread and currants about 10 minutes before baking.

Bake

  1. Bake for 45 minutes or until set.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  5. 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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard as they cook, giving the pudding its structure and body.
Bread
Soaks up the egg custard and forms the soft, layered body of the pudding.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, keeping the pudding moist as it bakes.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the custard brown lightly at the surface.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the bread layers and helps them brown.

The step that matters

Pour the egg mixture over the layered bread and currants about 10 minutes before baking. Letting the bread soak lets it absorb the custard evenly, so the pudding bakes moist rather than with dry pockets of bread.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

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