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Dessert

Bread Pudding, Boiled

A boiled bread pudding made with stale bread, raisins, suet, sugar, citrus peel, egg, milk, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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, Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Break the bread into small pieces.

  2. Cover the pieces with cold water.

  3. Soak for about 30 minutes.

  4. Strain the water and squeeze the bread dry.

Make the batter

  1. Beat out all lumps with a fork.

  2. Add the raisins, suet, sugar, peel, and nutmeg, then mix well.

  3. Beat the egg.

  4. Add the milk.

  5. Stir the mixture into the batter.

Steam and serve

  1. Put the mixture into a greased basin.

  2. Steam or boil for about 2 hours.

  3. Serve with a sweet sauce, if desired.

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
Soaked and squeezed, it forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the liquid.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the steamed pudding moist and tender.
Egg
Binds the mixture and helps it set as it cooks.
Milk
Supplies moisture so the bread softens into a cohesive batter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the savoury notes of the suet.
Raisins
Provide concentrated sweetness and chewy texture throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Squeeze the bread dry. Bread that stays waterlogged adds extra liquid to the batter, which dilutes it and can leave the steamed pudding heavy and wet inside.

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.

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