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Dessert

Bread Pudding

A custard-like pudding made with stale bread, Seville orange peel, milk, eggs, and sugar, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Bread Pudding

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 ↓

Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard base

  1. Boil the grated peel of the Seville orange in the milk.

  2. Pour the milk over the sliced bread and cover for 1 hour.

  3. Beat the egg yolks and egg whites together.

  4. Mix the eggs with the bread and milk, and beat for 10 minutes.

  5. Sweeten the mixture and pour it into a buttered basin.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil for 1 hour.

  2. Serve with melted butter and sugar 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. Bread + buttertop 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. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Soaks into the bread and forms the moist, custardy body of the pudding.
Stale bread
Absorbs the milk and egg mixture, giving the pudding its structure.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set into a soft, tender texture.
Egg whites
Whipped into the mixture to add lightness and help the pudding rise.
Seville orange peel
Adds a bitter, fragrant citrus aroma to the milk.

The step that matters

Boil for 1 hour. Steam from boiling water must heat the custard gently and evenly; if the water boils too hard or drops low, the pudding can cook unevenly, turning rubbery or leaving it wet in the centre.

Swap the orange

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

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

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

More bread pudding recipes

Apple 145Chocolate 53Brown 51Fruit 44Lemon 37Steamed 29 See all 1,021 →

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