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Dessert

Common Bread and Butter Pudding

A sweet pudding made with bread, butter, milk, sugar, eggs, nutmeg, and currants, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Common Bread and Butter 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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Grease a dish that holds nearly 3 pints.

Make the custard

  1. Sweeten the milk with the sugar.

  2. Stir in the beaten eggs and grated nutmeg.

Assemble and bake

  1. Layer bread and butter in the dish, sprinkling currants between layers.

  2. Pour the milk mixture over the layers.

  3. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour.

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

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

  2. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Nutmeg + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Nutmeg + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the custard and set it into a soft, sliceable texture as it bakes.
Milk
Forms the liquid custard that soaks into the bread and gives the pudding its moisture.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps the top brown as it bakes.
Currants
Add pockets of concentrated sweetness and chewy fruitiness between the bread layers.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the custard.

The step that matters

Pour the milk mixture over the layers. The bread must be fully soaked so the custard sets evenly; dry patches stay bready while the eggs in the liquid set the rest into a custard.

Swap the currant

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

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

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