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Dessert

Queen of Bread Puddings

A baked bread pudding made with milk, breadcrumbs, butter, sugar, eggs, lemon rind, and topped with jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Queen of Bread Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the milk and pour it over the breadcrumbs.

  2. Add the sugar, butter, and lemon rind.

  3. Once cooled slightly, stir in the beaten egg yolks.

Bake and finish

  1. Place the mixture in a buttered pie dish and bake for 10 minutes or until set.

  2. Spread a thick layer of jam on top.

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

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

  2. Milk + apricottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + apricottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,098 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + apricottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,458 recipes

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

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Softens the breadcrumbs and forms the moist, custard-like base of the pudding.
Breadcrumbs
Absorb the liquid and give the pudding its body and structure.
Eggs
Set when baked, binding the pudding into a soft, sliceable texture.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving a softer, more tender crumb.
Castor sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown lightly while baking.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks after the mixture has cooled slightly. Eggs begin to set when hot, so adding them to very hot milk can scramble them and leave a grainy texture. Cooling the base a little first lets the eggs blend smoothly and set evenly in the oven.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

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