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Dessert

Newmarket Pudding

A custard bread pudding made with currants, buttered bread, milk, eggs, and flavored with lemon rind, bay leaf or cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Newmarket Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Butter a pie dish and layer it with thin slices of bread.

  2. Sprinkle washed currants between the layers.

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, boil milk with lemon rind, bay leaf, or cinnamon for flavor.

  2. In a bowl, whisk together milk, egg yolks, egg white, and cornflour.

  3. Sweeten the mixture to taste and pour it over the bread layers.

Bake

  1. Bake in a preheated oven at 350°F (175°C) until the custard is set and the top is lightly browned.

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. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg yolks and white thicken the milk into a set custard that holds the bread together.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, moistening the bread as it bakes.
Bread
Forms the layers that soak up the custard and give the pudding its body.
Cornflour
Helps stabilise the custard so it sets smoothly rather than curdling.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy texture between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Baking until the custard is set. Egg proteins set with heat and firm the custard; underbaking leaves it runny, while overbaking can make it curdle and turn rubbery.

Swap the currant

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

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

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