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Dessert

Newcastle Pudding

A steamed bread pudding made with candied cherries, wholemeal bread, custard of milk and eggs, and flavored with almond.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Newcastle Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Butter a pudding mold and line it with the candied cherries.

  2. Fill the mold with slices of bread and butter.

Make the custard

  1. Sweeten the milk to taste and add the almond flavoring.

  2. Beat the eggs and mix them well with the milk.

  3. Pour the custard over the bread and butter and let it soak for 1 hour.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam the pudding for 1½ hours.

  2. Turn out the pudding and serve with any kind of sweet sauce.

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. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Egg + breadtop 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
Bind the custard and help set the pudding when steamed.
Milk
Forms the liquid custard that soaks into the bread and sets with the eggs.
Allinson wholemeal bread
Provides the body of the pudding, soaking up custard to hold its shape.
Candied cherries
Add sweetness and bright fruit flavour and decorate the turned-out pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the custard, balancing the eggs and milk.

The step that matters

Pour the custard over the bread and let it soak for 1 hour. The bread must fully absorb the custard before steaming. Dry patches stay firm and unset, while the egg proteins coagulate evenly during gentle steaming, giving a uniform, sliceable texture.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Pecansfits about as well
  2. Almondthe original
  3. Cocoafits about as well
  4. Peasfits about as well

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