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Dessert

Boiled Puddings

A boiled bread pudding made with milk, eggs, butter, rose water, nutmeg, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Boiled Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pudding

  1. Cut the bread into very thin slices.

  2. Soak the bread in the milk over a chafing dish until it absorbs all the milk.

  3. Add the butter and stir until combined, then let it cool.

  4. Beat the egg yolks and whites with rose water, nutmeg, salt, and sugar.

  5. Mix the egg mixture with the soaked bread.

Boil and serve

  1. Tie the mixture in a cloth loosely to allow for swelling.

  2. Boil for 1 hour.

  3. Serve with melted butter poured over it.

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. Milk + buttertop 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

Bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up the milk and eggs to hold its shape.
Milk
Softens the bread and supplies the liquid that the eggs set in.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set into a tender, firm texture.
Egg whites
Add lightness and help the pudding swell as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth loosely. Puddings expand as they heat and the trapped air and steam need room to swell. A tight cloth can burst or squeeze the pudding into a dense, uneven mass.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Cinnamonfits about as well
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Allspicefits less well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

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