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Dessert

A Boiled Bread Pudding

A boiled bread pudding made with bread crumbs, milk, eggs, sugar, currants, almonds, citron, butter, flour, and orange flower water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

A Boiled Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the crumbs

  1. Pour the scalded milk over the bread crumbs and cover for 1 hour.

Make the mixture

  1. Beat the eggs until light and add them to the bread mixture.

  2. Stir in the flour, butter, sugar, currants, and pounded blanched almonds.

  3. Add orange flower water to taste.

Boil and serve

  1. Butter a covered mold that will hold the mixture and boil steadily for 1 hour.

  2. Serve with either hot or cold sauce.

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. Almond + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Almond + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set and bind the mixture as they cook, giving the pudding its structure.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the hot milk and form the body of the pudding.
Scalded milk
Adds moisture and softens the crumbs into a tender texture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smoother, more tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the flavour.
Flour
Adds a little thickening to help the mixture hold together.

The step that matters

Boil steadily in a covered mold. The pudding cooks by gentle steam and water heat, so the water must keep boiling for the full hour. If the boil drops or the mold is uncovered, the eggs set unevenly and the pudding can turn out dry or heavy.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, sugar, almond, butter, flour, orange. 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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