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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A custard-soaked bread pudding with butter, currants, citrus, eggs, milk, pimentos, and a hint of ratafia.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Bread and Butter Pudding

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 ↓

Bread and Butter 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.

Assemble

  1. Spread butter on slices of bread and layer them in a dish with currants between each layer.

  2. Add sliced citron, orange, or lemon for extra flavor.

  3. Optionally, use pastry to create a decorative edge around the dish.

Make the custard and bake

  1. In a bowl, mix milk, eggs, pimentos, and ratafia to create an unboiled custard.

  2. Pour the custard over the layered bread and let it soak for at least 2 hours before baking.

  3. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C) until set.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Currant + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Slices of bread
Form the bulk of the pudding and soak up the custard to become tender.
Eggs
Set the custard as it bakes, binding the bread into a sliceable pudding.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and keeps the pudding moist.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the bread brown and taste savory-sweet.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and chew between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Soaking the bread before baking. Letting the bread soak in the custard for at least 2 hours allows the liquid to fully penetrate the slices. Thorough soaking gives an even, custardy texture rather than dry patches or pockets of unset egg.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, currant, egg, milk. 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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