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Dessert

An Old-fashioned Bread Pudding

A custard-like pudding made from soaked bread crumbs, milk, eggs, butter, baking soda, nutmeg, baked until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

An Old-fashioned Bread 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 the batter

  1. Soak the bread crumbs in the milk for 2 hours.

  2. Stir in the beaten egg yolks, melted butter, dissolved baking soda, and nutmeg.

  3. Gently fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a well-greased pudding dish.

  2. Cover and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes, then uncover and brown.

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 crumbs
Soak up the milk and form the body of the pudding.
Milk
Softens the crumbs and provides moisture for a custard-like texture.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set as it bakes.
Egg whites
Folded in whipped to lighten the pudding and add structure as it rises.
Baking soda
Reacts with the dish's acidity to help the pudding rise and lighten.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whipped whites hold air that lightens the pudding. Folding gently, rather than stirring, keeps that air from collapsing, so the pudding stays light instead of dense.

Swap the nutmeg

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

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

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