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Dessert

Apple Bread Pudding

A pudding made with bread crumbs, suet, apples, currants, lemon, eggs, cider, and sugar, boiled and served with nutmeg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Apple Bread Pudding

Why it works: Apple and cider are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,238 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Apple Bread Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the bread crumbs, chopped suet, chopped apples, currants, lemon rind and juice, salt, eggs, and cider with sugar until well combined.

  2. Boil the mixture in a cloth or mold for two hours.

Serve

  1. Serve with a liquid sauce seasoned with nutmeg.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Apple + cidertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,238 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Currant + cidertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together500 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Apple + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

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

  5. Bread + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the texture and keeps the pudding moist as it cooks.
Eggs
Bind the mixture together and help it set as it cooks.
Tart apples
Add moisture and a bright acidity that balances the sweetness.
Currants
Add small pockets of concentrated sweetness and chewy texture.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture for two hours. The pudding must cook gently and steadily in a sealed cloth or mold so the eggs set and the crumbs hold together without drying out or turning watery. Water should be kept at a steady boil and topped up as needed.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, apple, currant, egg, cider, sugar):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, apple, currant, egg, cider, sugar. 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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