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Bread and Butter Pudding

A custard-soaked bread dessert with butter, currants, and sugar.

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

Why it works: Butter and bread 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 ↓

Bread and Butter Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk with a little lemon peel and sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Beat an egg and stir it into the milk, then return to heat to thicken.

Soak and layer

  1. Butter the slices of bread or French roll and soak them in the custard for 1–2 hours.

  2. Layer the soaked bread in a dish, sprinkling currants and pounded sugar between each layer.

  3. Add sweetmeats on top, if desired.

  4. Pour over the remaining milk mixed with two beaten eggs.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken the custard when gently heated and set the pudding's body.
Milk
Forms the custard base that soaks into the bread and keeps it moist.
Bread
Soaks up the custard and forms the soft, layered body of the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the custard and between the layers.
Butter
Adds richness to the bread slices before they soak.

The step that matters

Returning the egg-milk mixture to heat. Egg proteins thicken the custard only at gentle heat. If it gets too hot or boils, the eggs scramble and the custard turns grainy, so stir constantly over low heat.

Swap the currant

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

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

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