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Dessert

Another Way to Make Bread Pudding

Bread pudding made with grated bread, milk, spices, lemon peel, sugar, eggs, butter, and served with sweet sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon 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 ↓

Another Way to Make Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Combine grated bread and milk in a saucepan until the bread is covered.

  2. Add nutmeg, cinnamon, and lemon peel; boil for about 10 minutes.

  3. Sweeten with pounded sugar, remove the lemon peel, and stir in beaten eggs and butter.

Cook and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered basin or mold; boil for 1 hour, or bake if preferred.

  2. Serve with a 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.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 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. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

  5. Milk + buttertop 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

Grated bread
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the milk to hold its shape.
Eggs
Set as they heat, binding the pudding into a custard-like texture.
Milk
Softens the bread and adds moisture to the pudding.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother mouthfeel.
Pounded sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds to its browning when baked.

The step that matters

Cooking the egg mixture gently. Eggs set into a custard as they heat. Heat that is too high or too fast can make the eggs curdle or turn rubbery, leaving the pudding watery or dense.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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