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Dessert

Baked Bread Pudding

A sweet pudding made from stale bread soaked in milk, eggs, butter, sugar, and baking powder, baked or boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Baked Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the batter

  1. Soften the bread cubes in the milk.

  2. Stir in the beaten egg yolks, melted butter, sugar, and nutmeg to taste.

  3. Beat the egg whites until light and fold them into the mixture.

  4. Sift in the baking powder and mix well.

Bake or boil and serve

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C) and bake for 1 hour.

  2. Alternatively, pour the mixture into a mold or bag and boil for 2 hours.

  3. 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. Milk + breadtop 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. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Egg yolks enrich the custard and whites, whipped and folded in, lighten the texture.
Stale bread
Dry bread cubes soak up the milk and give the pudding its body.
Milk
Liquid that soaks into the bread and sets with the eggs into a custard.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, helping the pudding rise and become lighter.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender crumb.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Whites whipped to a foam trap air that lightens the pudding. Folding gently keeps that air in, while stirring hard would deflate it and leave a denser result.

“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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