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Dessert

Bread Pudding, Baked

A baked pudding made from stale bread, raisins, suet, sugar, egg, milk, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,377 recipes. Both carry alpha-terpineol, which smells lilac, floral. The science ↓

Bread Pudding, Baked

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the bread

  1. Break the stale bread into small pieces and soak in cold water for about 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the bread and squeeze it dry, then beat out lumps with a fork.

Mix and bake

  1. Stir in the sugar, suet, raisins, and nutmeg until well mixed.

  2. Add the beaten egg and enough milk to make the mixture moist enough to drop from a spoon.

  3. Pour the mixture into a greased pie dish and bake at 300°F (150°C) for about 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Once done, turn out onto a hot dish and sprinkle with sugar.

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. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  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

Stale bread
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the custard-like moisture.
Egg
Binds the mixture and helps it set as it bakes.
Suet
Adds richness and fat, giving a moister, softer texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown lightly during baking.
Raisins or currants
Add sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Adding milk to the mixture. The milk must be added until the mixture is moist enough to drop from a spoon. Too little leaves the bread dry and crumbly, while too much makes the pudding soggy and slow to set in the oven.

Swap the raisin

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

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

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

More bread pudding recipes

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