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Dessert

Newmarket Pudding

A custard bread pudding made with milk, eggs, butter, currants, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

Newmarket 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

  1. Bring 1 pint of milk to a boil with ½ lemon peel, ¼ teaspoon cinnamon, and 1 bay leaf, then boil gently for 5 to 10 minutes.

  2. Sweeten the milk with loaf sugar to taste.

  3. Beat together the yolks of 5 eggs and the whites of 3 eggs.

  4. Add the milk to the eggs and mix well.

  5. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

Assemble and bake

  1. Layer thinly sliced bread, butter, and currants in a pie dish until nearly full.

  2. Pour the custard over the layers and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  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

Egg yolks and whole eggs
Set the custard and give it a rich, smooth body as it bakes.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that sets around the bread.
Bread
Forms the layers that soak up the custard and hold the pudding's structure.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the bread layers, aiding browning.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and chew between the bread layers.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the custard and adds to its flavour balance.

The step that matters

Gently simmering and straining the custard. Boiling the milk gently keeps it from scorching, and straining the egg mixture removes any cooked strands, so the custard bakes smooth. Eggs that get too hot can curdle and turn grainy.

Swap the currant

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

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

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