Name: Bread and Butter Pudding. No. 2
Ingredients: stale bread, rolled fine; any kind of fruit; sugar; 1 pint milk; sifted flour

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 ↓

Bread and Butter Pudding. No. 2

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble

Place a layer of rolled stale bread in the bottom of a pudding dish.
Add a layer of fruit and sprinkle with sugar.
Repeat layers of bread and fruit until the dish is full, finishing with bread crumbs on top.

Make the custard and bake

Make a custard by mixing 1 pint of milk with sifted flour and pour it over the pudding.
Bake until the fruit is cooked.

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.

Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,466 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78,219 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).
Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together77,875 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Bread + flourtop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together10,383 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour 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

Stale bread: Forms the structure and soaks up the custard as the pudding sets.
Fruit: Adds moisture and fruity flavour between the bread layers.
Sugar: Sweetens the fruit layers.
Milk: Forms the liquid base of the custard that sets around the bread.
Sifted flour: Thickens the milk so the custard holds together while baking.

“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.