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Dessert

Common Bread Pudding

A simple pudding made by soaking bread in milk, adding eggs, and boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Common Bread Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the bread

  1. Pour 1 quart of boiling milk over enough bread cut into small pieces to absorb it.

  2. Cover with a plate and let it cool.

Mix and cook

  1. Mash the soaked bread and add the beaten eggs.

  2. Mix well and place in a floured, wet cloth.

  3. Boil for 1.5 hours and serve with sweet sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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
Soaks into the bread and gives the pudding its moist, tender body.
Eggs
Bind the soaked bread and set during cooking to give the pudding structure.
Bread
Absorbs the milk and forms the soft, starchy base of the pudding.

The step that matters

Mix well and place in a floured, wet cloth. The cloth must be wet and floured so the pudding does not stick and form a crust that tears; a well-mixed batter also cooks evenly, without dense pockets of egg or dry bread.

“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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