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Dessert

Bread Pudding, Light

A steamed pudding made from bread, milk, eggs, nutmeg, lemon peel, sugar, and optional currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Bread Pudding, Light

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Pour boiling-hot milk over the bread slices or crumbs.

  2. Let it cool.

  3. Beat the whole egg and the two yolks together.

  4. Mix the eggs with the bread, adding nutmeg, lemon peel, and sugar to taste.

  5. Add currants if desired.

Steam and serve

  1. Grease a pudding basin with butter and pour in the mixture.

  2. Cover the top with buttered paper.

  3. Place the basin in a saucepan with boiling water and steam for 30 minutes or more, depending on size.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Its starch absorbs the milk and eggs, giving the pudding its soft, set body.
Milk
Provides liquid that soaks into the bread and keeps the pudding moist.
Eggs
Set when heated, binding the bread into a custard-like, tender texture.
White powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the richness of the eggs and milk.

The step that matters

Steaming the pudding. Steam must be kept gently boiling for the full time so the egg sets evenly throughout. Too little heat leaves the centre wet, while overcooking can make it rubbery.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, nutmeg, lemon, sugar, 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.

More bread pudding recipes

Apple 145Chocolate 53Brown 51Fruit 44Lemon 37Steamed 29 See all 1,021 →

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