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Dessert

Scrap Bread Pudding

A sweet pudding made from bread scraps, suet, fruit, milk, and egg, steamed and served with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Scrap Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Remove the brown crust from the bread scraps and soak them in water for 1 hour.

  2. Squeeze out the water and place the bread in a dry bowl.

Make the mixture

  1. Add the sugar, suet or dripping, and fruit to the bread.

  2. Boil the milk and pour it over the bread mixture, whisking well with a fork.

  3. Beat the egg and add it along with the ground ginger.

Steam and serve

  1. Butter a basin and pour the pudding mixture into it.

  2. Steam the pudding for 1.5 hours.

  3. Serve with 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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

  3. Currant + milktop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Bread + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,398 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Bread scraps
Form the body of the pudding, soaking up the milk and egg to set into a soft crumb.
Egg
Binds the mixture and helps it set firm when steamed.
Milk
Moistens the bread and carries the sugar and spice through the pudding.
Suet or dripping
Adds fat, giving richness and a softer, more tender texture.
Currants or raisins
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy fruit through the pudding.

The step that matters

Squeeze out the soaking water. Bread left wet holds too much liquid, so the pudding can turn soggy and fail to set. Removing the excess water lets the bread absorb only the measured milk and egg.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Gingerthe original

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

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