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Dessert

New Bread Pudding

A steamed pudding made from stale bread, currants, sugar, egg, milk, ginger, and beef suet.

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 ↓

New Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Soak the stale bread in cold water, then strain in a colander and squeeze out the excess water.

  2. Beat the soaked bread with a fork until smooth.

Mix and steam

  1. Add the beef suet, currants, and sugar, and mix thoroughly.

  2. In a separate bowl, combine the beaten egg and milk, then add to the bread mixture.

  3. Pour the mixture into a greased basin and steam for 2 hours.

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. Milk + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,759 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Bread + beeftop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Provides the body of the pudding; soaking softens it so it can bind with the custard.
Egg
Sets the mixture as it cooks, holding the pudding together.
Milk
Adds moisture and softens the bread into a custard-like texture.
Beef suet
Adds fat that makes the pudding rich and moist as it steams.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the savory richness of the suet.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of fruit sweetness throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Squeezing out the soaked bread. If too much water stays in the bread, the pudding becomes soggy and loose, so it may not set firmly when steamed.

Swap the currant

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

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

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