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Dessert

Boiled Bread Pudding

A boiled pudding made with bread crumbs, flour, raisins, and sweetened with Lyle's Golden Syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding mixture

  1. Warm the Lyle's Golden Syrup and margarine together.

  2. Mix in the flour, bread crumbs, raisins, and mixed spice.

  3. Dissolve the carbonate of soda in the milk and add it to the mixture. Mix everything well and pour into a greased mold.

Boil and serve

  1. Boil for one hour or more.

  2. Serve with sweet sauce or additional Lyle's Golden Syrup.

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. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Flour + syruptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,540 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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 crumbs
Form the bulk of the pudding and soak up the liquid to give it body.
Flour
Adds structure so the pudding holds its shape after boiling.
Carbonate of soda
Reacts with the moist mixture to produce gas that lightens the pudding.
Lyle's golden syrup
Adds sweetness and a moist, rich texture to the pudding.
Margarine
Adds fat, which keeps the pudding tender and adds richness.

The step that matters

Dissolving the carbonate of soda in the milk. Baking soda must be fully dissolved and mixed evenly through the batter, or pockets of it can leave soapy, bitter spots and uneven rising. Mixing everything well ensures it reacts throughout the pudding.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, flour, milk, syrup):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Raisinthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Peachfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, milk, syrup. 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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