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Dessert

Bread Pudding

A baked dessert made with bread crumbs, butter, eggs, milk, sugar, citrus peel, spices, and dried fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Bread Pudding

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Bread 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 the custard base

  1. Pour 1 pint of boiling milk over 4 ounces of bread crumbs and 2 tablespoons of fresh butter, then cover until cold.

  2. Mix 3 beaten eggs, 1 tablespoon of sugar, ½ grated lemon or lime peel, and a little pounded cinnamon.

Assemble and bake

  1. Butter a dish or mold.

  2. Layer thin slices of buttered bread and currants or raisins.

  3. Pour the egg mixture over the bread layers.

  4. Repeat layering with more bread, currants, and batter until the dish is nearly full.

  5. Pour any remaining batter on top.

  6. Bake in a buttered dish at 350°F (175°C) until set.

Serve

  1. Serve with 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.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread crumbs
Soak up the hot milk and form the soft, bulky body of the pudding.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set on baking to give the pudding its firm, custard-like texture.
Milk
Moistens the bread and forms the liquid custard that sets during baking.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and fat, softening the crumb and carrying flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and contributes to browning on the top.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Eggs thicken as they heat, so the pudding should be baked until just set in the centre. Overbaking makes the custard grainy and watery as it curdles and weeps.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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

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