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Marmalade Pudding

A custard bread pudding layered with fruit marmalade and baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and peach work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 781 recipes. Both carry phellandrene, which smells minty. The science ↓

Marmalade 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. Scald the milk.

  2. Beat the eggs with the sugar until light, then pour the scalded milk over them.

  3. Return the mixture to the pot and cook for 5 minutes without thickening.

Layer and soak

  1. Butter both sides of the bread slices and fit them neatly in the bottom of a pudding dish.

  2. Spread a thick layer of marmalade over the bread and pour some boiling custard on top, allowing it to absorb before adding more layers.

  3. Continue layering until all ingredients are used, then cover with a plate or lid.

  4. Let it sit for 30 minutes to absorb the custard.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake covered at 350°F (175°C) until heated through, then uncover to brown.

  2. Optionally, top with a meringue made from whipped egg whites and powdered sugar before browning.

  3. Serve cold with cream.

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. Milk + peachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together781 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

  2. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  4. Bread + peachtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together55 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + peachtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard and give the pudding its structure as they cook.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that soaks into the bread.
Stale bread
Absorbs the custard and forms the body of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps it brown on top.
Fruit marmalade
Adds sweetness, acidity and fruit flavour between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Cook the custard without thickening it. Eggs thicken when heated, so cooking the custard too long can curdle or scramble it. Stopping at a pourable custard lets it soak evenly into the bread and set gently during baking.

Swap the peach

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

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

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