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Dessert

A Brown Bread Pudding

A pudding made from stale brown bread, suet, currants, sugar, nutmeg, candied peel, eggs, and brandy, boiled in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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A Brown Bread Pudding

Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

A Brown Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a large bowl, combine the grated brown bread, chopped suet, currants, salt, sugar, grated nutmeg, candied peel, beaten eggs, and brandy. Mix the ingredients thoroughly until well combined.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the mixture in a cloth and boil for 3 hours and 30 minutes.

  2. Serve with port wine sauce and optionally add grated lemon rind for extra flavor.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Currant + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Nutmeg + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and set it into a firm, sliceable pudding as they cook.
Stale brown bread
Provides the body of the pudding and soaks up the liquid from the eggs and brandy.
Suet
Adds richness and fat, keeping the pudding moist and tender during the long boil.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the suet and brandy.

The step that matters

Boiling the pudding in a cloth. The pudding must be boiled for the full time so the egg proteins set and the suet melts into the crumb. Undercooking leaves it wet and loose, while the cloth must be secured so water does not get in.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, currant, sugar, nutmeg, egg, brandy):

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

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