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Dessert

Boiled Bread Pudding. — No. 2

A boiled pudding made from bread crumbs, milk, eggs, flour, butter, sugar, currants, and lemon extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Boiled Bread Pudding. — No. 2

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

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

  2. Beat the eggs until light, stir in the flour, then add to the bread crumbs.

  3. Wash, pick, and dry the currants, flour them, and stir into the mixture with the sugar.

  4. Add the lemon extract.

Boil and serve

  1. Flour a cloth, place the pudding inside, tie it tightly, and boil for 1 hour.

  2. Serve with a hot 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. 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Bind the mixture and give the boiled pudding its light, set structure.
Bread crumbs
Soak up the hot milk to form the body of the pudding.
Currants
Add chewy pockets of sweetness and fruit through the pudding.
Scalded milk
Moistens the bread crumbs and keeps the pudding tender.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the pudding.

The step that matters

Tying the cloth. The cloth must be floured and tied tightly so the pudding holds its shape and the cloth does not let in water while it boils. A loose tie lets water soak the pudding and make it soggy.

Swap the currant

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

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

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