Skip to main content
Dessert

Eoiled Bread Pudding

A custard-like pudding made from milk-soaked breadcrumbs, eggs, sugar, butter, currants, and nutmeg, boiled for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Eoiled Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard base

  1. Bring the milk to a boil.

  2. Pour the hot milk over the breadcrumbs.

  3. Let the mixture cool.

  4. Add the sugar, beaten eggs, and washed, picked, and dried currants.

Cook and serve

  1. Mix well and pour into a buttered basin.

  2. Tie the basin tightly with a cloth.

  3. Submerge in boiling water and boil for 14 hours.

  4. Turn out of the basin and serve with sifted sugar.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Currant + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Breadcrumbs
Soak up the hot milk and form the body of the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set as it cooks.
Milk
Softens the breadcrumbs and provides moisture for a tender texture.
Butter
Greases the basin so the pudding releases cleanly.
Currants
Add sweetness and chewy bursts of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Boil in a tightly tied basin. Water must stay at a steady boil and the cloth must be tight so the pudding cooks through and holds its shape. Boiling water that drops in temperature lengthens cooking and can leave the centre undercooked.

Swap the currant

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

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

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

More bread pudding recipes

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

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipes