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Dessert

A Bread and Butter Pudding

A simple bread and butter pudding made with sliced bread, butter, currants, milk, eggs, nutmeg, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

A 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. Cut the bread into thin slices and butter each slice.

  2. Butter a baking dish and layer the bread slices in it, sprinkling currants between the layers.

Make the custard

  1. In a bowl, mix the milk, eggs, salt, grated nutmeg, and sugar until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture over the layered bread and currants.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) for about 30 minutes.

  2. Serve warm, optionally with a puff pastry base.

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Currant + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together494 recipes

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

  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

Eggs
Set the custard as it bakes, giving the pudding its body and structure.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, moistening the bread as it soaks.
Bread
Soaks up the custard and forms the layered structure of the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the bread brown lightly on the surface.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy texture between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Pour the custard over the layered bread. The bread needs time to absorb the liquid before baking; if it is poured in too quickly or the bread is not fully soaked, the custard can pool and the pudding may bake unevenly.

Swap the currant

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

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

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