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Dessert

Bread Puddings

A custard-like dish made by boiling milk, soaking sliced bread, and baking with eggs, sugar, spices, butter, and optional ingredients.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard base

  1. Boil enough milk for your dish size with flavorings.

  2. Once the milk boils, remove any laurel leaves and add the bread.

  3. Let it sit for a few minutes to swell, then beat it fine.

Mix and bake

  1. Cut the bread into thin slices.

  2. Stir in the beaten eggs, sugar, allspice or nutmeg, and butter or suet.

  3. If using, add currants carefully to avoid curdling the milk.

  4. Bake for less than an hour until lightly browned.

Other methods and enrichments

  1. For a delicate version, use only fine bread crumbs and rich milk.

  2. For every tablespoon of bread, use one egg and sweeten with loaf sugar.

  3. Butter a basin and boil for 20-50 minutes, depending on size.

  4. For enrichment, add cream, butter, almonds, and ratafia or brandy.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Allspice + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,359 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the mixture and set it into a custard as it bakes.
Bread
Forms the body of the pudding and soaks up the milk to become soft.
Milk
Softens the bread and provides the liquid that the eggs set in.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving a softer, more tender crumb.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown during baking.

The step that matters

Adding currants to the milk mixture. Adding currants carefully avoids curdling the milk. Curdling happens when hot milk meets acid or sudden temperature shifts, so fold them in gently rather than dropping them into a hot mixture.

Swap the currant

The recipe marks currant as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, bread, egg, sugar, allspice, butter, cream):

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

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