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Dessert

Baked Puddings

A sweet bread pudding made with cubed bread, butter, milk, sugar, eggs, candied orange rind, and nutmeg, topped with whipped egg white icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

Baked Puddings

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. In a dish, warm the butter and add plenty of sugar on top.

Make and bake the pudding

  1. In a bowl, combine the bread, milk, sugar, egg yolks, candied orange rind, and nutmeg.

  2. Pour the mixture into the prepared dish.

  3. Bake for 1 hour.

Ice and finish

  1. Whip the egg whites until stiff and fold in the sugar for icing.

  2. Spread the icing over the pudding.

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. 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. Orange + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the soft, absorbent body that soaks up the milk and egg custard.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set into a tender, creamy texture.
Milk
Provides the liquid that softens the bread and forms the custard with the eggs.
Egg whites
Whipped with sugar to make a stiff, airy icing that browns lightly on top.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps the icing hold its structure and brown.
Butter
Adds fat and richness and helps the sugar caramelise on the base of the dish.

The step that matters

Whipping the egg white icing. Egg whites must be whipped until stiff, with sugar added properly, to form a stable foam. Under-whipped or greasy whites will collapse and make the icing runny when spread over the pudding.

Swap the orange

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

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

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