Skip to main content
Dessert

An Excellent Bread Pudding

A custard-like dessert made from bread crumbs, milk, butter, lemon rind, eggs, and sugar, baked and topped with fruit preserves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Excellent Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Pour the milk over the bread crumbs and let it stand until soft.

  2. Add the butter, lemon rind, beaten egg yolks, and sugar to the mixture.

  3. Bake in a pudding dish until set.

Top and brown

  1. Once cool, spread with jelly, preserves, or stewed fruit.

  2. Beat the egg whites with powdered sugar until stiff, and flavor with lemon.

  3. Spread over the pudding.

  4. Return to the oven to 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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 soft body of the pudding.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard so it sets when baked.
Egg whites
Whip into a stiff meringue that gives a light, browned topping.
Milk
Provides the liquid that softens the crumbs and forms the custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the meringue stay stable and brown.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites until stiff. Egg whites must be beaten until they hold firm peaks; under-whipped whites collapse and make the topping weep or flatten. Stiff whites trap air that expands and sets in the oven.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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

More bread pudding recipes

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

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipes