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Dessert

Bread Pudding

A baked dessert made with soaked bread, eggs, milk, sugar, and optional raisins.

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

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 ↓

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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the custard

  1. In a large bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the sugar.

  2. Add the soaked bread, salt, spice or lemon rind, milk, and raisins if using.

  3. Pour the mixture into a baking dish.

Bake

  1. Bake for nearly 2 hours, 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 + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + raisintop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

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.
Bread
Soaks up the liquid and forms the body of the pudding.
Milk
Provides the liquid that the eggs set into a soft custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps browning on the surface.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Eggs thicken as their proteins coagulate with heat. Pulling the pudding too early leaves it runny in the center, while overbaking can make it dry and grainy.

Swap the raisin

The recipe marks raisin as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, bread, lemon, milk):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, bread, lemon, 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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