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Dessert

Bread-and-butter Pudding

A custard-soaked bread pudding with currants, nutmeg, and butter.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter and cut six thin slices of bread.

  2. Grease the inside of a 1‑pint pie dish with ½ cup of clarified dripping.

  3. Wash 1 oz of currants, dry them, and pick them over.

Assemble and soak

  1. Layer the slices of bread and butter in the pie dish, sprinkling the currants between each slice.

  2. In a cup, beat 2 eggs, then add 1 tablespoon of moist sugar and 2 cups of milk, stirring well.

  3. Pour the custard over the bread and butter.

  4. Grate about ½ teaspoon of nutmeg on top.

  5. Let it soak for 30 minutes.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven for about 30 minutes.

  2. Serve in the dish or turn out onto a hot flat dish and sprinkle with ½ teaspoon of caster sugar.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set the custard and bind it to the bread as it bakes.
Bread and butter
Forms the structure, soaking up custard while its butter adds richness.
Milk
Makes the custard liquid that soaks the bread and cooks into a soft set.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy fruit between the bread layers.
Clarified dripping
Greases the dish and adds fat for flavour and browning at the edges.

The step that matters

Letting it soak for 30 minutes. The bread needs time to absorb the custard evenly; without soaking, dry patches stay unset and the pudding bakes unevenly.

Swap the currant

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

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

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