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Dessert

Brown Bread Pudding

A pudding made from stale brown bread, suet, currants, sugar, nutmeg, lime rind, eggs, and brandy, boiled in a cloth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Brown Bread Pudding

Why it works: Nutmeg and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 236 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Brown Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Combine grated brown bread, chopped suet, currants, salt, sugar, grated nutmeg, lime rind, beaten eggs, and brandy in a large bowl and mix thoroughly until well combined.

  2. Place the mixture in a cloth and boil for 3.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with wine 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. Nutmeg + limetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together236 recipes

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

  2. Currant + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

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

  4. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Nutmeg + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,311 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale brown bread
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the eggs and brandy.
Suet
Adds richness and a moist, tender texture as it melts during cooking.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and help it set as it cooks.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of sweetness throughout the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds a little moisture to the mix.

The step that matters

Boiling the pudding. The cloth must be tied loosely enough for the pudding to expand as it cooks, and the water must keep simmering so the eggs set evenly through the centre without the pudding turning soggy or dense.

Swap the lime

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, currant, sugar, nutmeg, egg, brandy):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, currant, sugar, nutmeg, egg, brandy. 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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