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Dessert

A Fine Bread Pudding

A sweet bread pudding made with bread crumbs, milk, sugar, eggs, lemon, and topped with whipped egg whites and jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

A Fine 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 base

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

  2. In a bowl, combine bread crumbs, milk, sugar, egg yolks, lemon rind, and butter.

  3. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake until set.

Top and finish

  1. In another bowl, whip the egg whites until soft peaks form.

  2. Gradually beat in powdered sugar and lemon juice until stiff peaks form.

  3. Spread a layer of jelly or jam over the baked pudding.

  4. Top with the whipped egg whites and return to the oven to brown slightly.

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

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

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

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

  3. Lemon + raspberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Form the bulk of the custard base and soak up the milk.
Egg yolks
Enrich and set the custard so it holds a soft, tender texture.
Milk
Provides liquid that the crumbs absorb and the eggs set into custard.
Egg whites
Whipped into a stiff meringue that gives a light topping that browns in the oven.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves easily into the whipped whites to stabilise the meringue topping.

The step that matters

Whipping the egg whites to stiff peaks. Egg whites must be whipped until stiff and the sugar added gradually so the foam holds its volume. Under-whipped or greasy whites will slump and weep rather than brown into a light meringue topping.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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