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Dessert

Bread Pudding

A baked pudding made from soaked biscuits or stale bread, eggs, butter, and spices, served with a currant sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 19 ingredients
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Bread Pudding

Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. If using stale bread, break it into small pieces.

  2. Soak the pieces in cold water.

  3. Drain the water.

  4. In a bowl, mix the soaked bread with boiling milk or water, suet, eggs, and spices.

  5. Add sultana raisins if desired.

  6. Pour the mixture into a greased basin.

  7. Cover with a cloth.

Boil and make the sauce

  1. Boil for 1.5 hours.

  2. Boil currants in water for 5 minutes.

  3. Mash the boiled currants with a spoon.

  4. Stir in flour mixed with cold water.

  5. Add spices and sugar to taste.

  6. Cook until thickened.

  7. Sweeten with treacle if desired.

Serve

  1. Serve the pudding with the sauce poured around it.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Biscuit + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together889 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Biscuit + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Biscuit + potatotop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together137 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Bind the soaked bread and set the pudding as it cooks.
Stale bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the liquid and suet.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the texture and keeps the pudding moist.
Potato flour
Thickens the sauce so it becomes smooth and coats the spoon.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in flour mixed with cold water. Flour mixed first with cold water forms a smooth slurry that can be stirred into hot liquid without lumps. Added directly to hot liquid, starch clumps. Cooking until thickened lets the starch swell and set the sauce.

Swap the raisin

The recipe marks raisin as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (biscuit, egg, butter, sugar, lemon, potato, flour):

  1. Raisinthe original
  2. Vanillafits about as well
  3. Blueberryfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, egg, butter, sugar, lemon, potato, flour. 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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