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Dessert

Bread Pudding, Baked

A baked pudding made from stale bread, raisins, suet, sugar, egg, milk, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,377 recipes. Both carry alpha-terpineol, which smells lilac, floral. The science ↓

Bread Pudding, Baked

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the bread

  1. Break the stale bread into small pieces and soak in cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Strain the bread and squeeze it dry.

Make the mixture

  1. Beat out lumps with a fork, then stir in sugar, suet, raisins, and nutmeg.

  2. Add the beaten egg and enough milk to make the mixture moist enough to drop from a spoon.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a greased pie dish and bake at 300°F (150°C) for about 1 hour.

  2. When done, turn out onto a hot dish and sprinkle with sugar.

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. Raisin + nutmegtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-terpineol (lilac, floral).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

  5. Bread + nutmegtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the body of the pudding, soaking up liquid to become soft and tender.
Egg
Binds the mixture and helps it set when baked.
Suet
Adds fat that enriches the texture and keeps the pudding moist.
Milk
Adds moisture so the bread blends into a spoonable mixture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the top a light caramel color.

The step that matters

Squeezing the soaked bread dry. Excess water left in the bread dilutes the custard-like mixture, so it may bake up soggy and fail to set properly. Enough milk is then added by feel, so the bread should be well drained first.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Raisinthe original
  4. Lemonfits about as well

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

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