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Dessert

Baked Bread Pudding

A pudding made from stale bread soaked in water, mixed with flour, treacle or sugar, lemon peel, currants, spices, suet or dripping, eggs, and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Baked Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the bread

  1. Soak the bread in cold water for 24 hours, keeping it submerged with a plate.

  2. Drain the bread in a colander and press it dry.

Mix and bake

  1. Return the bread to the pan and add flour, treacle or sugar, lemon peel, currants, mixed spice, suet or dripping, and eggs. Mix everything well with a wooden spoon.

  2. Grease a baking dish with butter and pour the mixture into it.

  3. Bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven for about 3 hours.

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

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

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

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

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the liquid from the eggs and fat.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during baking to give the pudding its structure.
Treacle or moist sugar
Adds sweetness and a deep, moist, caramel-like flavour.
Suet or sweet dripping
Adds fat, giving a rich, tender texture as it melts during baking.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of sweetness and fruitiness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Draining and pressing the soaked bread. Bread holding too much water will leave the pudding wet and heavy, and the eggs cannot set properly. Pressing out the excess water lets the custard-like mixture bind and bake through evenly.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, sugar, lemon, egg. 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.

More bread pudding recipes

Apple 145Chocolate 53Brown 51Fruit 44Lemon 37Steamed 29 See all 1,021 →

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