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Dessert

Bread and Butter Pudding

A sweet pudding made with buttered bread, currants, eggs, sugar, nutmeg, and milk, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Bread and Butter Pudding

Why it works: Bread and milk 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 ↓

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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Wash and pick the currants.

Assemble

  1. Sprinkle some currants at the bottom of a quart dish.

  2. Layer the buttered bread in the dish, adding currants between each layer.

Make the custard

  1. In a bowl, beat the eggs (excluding one white) and mix in the sugar and nutmeg.

  2. Stir in the milk until well combined.

  3. Pour the egg mixture over the bread layers about 10 minutes before baking.

Bake

  1. Bake for 45 minutes or 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 + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  3. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Nutmeg + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard into a tender, sliceable structure as they cook.
Bread
Soaks up the custard and forms the body of the pudding.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, giving a soft, creamy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the eggs and milk.
Currants
Add pockets of sweet, chewy fruit between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Egg proteins coagulate as they heat, so the pudding is done when the centre has firmed. Underbaking leaves a loose, watery custard, while overbaking can make it grainy and dry.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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