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Dessert

Bread Pudding with Cherry Sauce

A custard-like pudding made from stale bread, milk, butter, sugar, eggs, currants, and rich milk, served with cherry sauce.

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 ↓

Bread Pudding with Cherry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Soak the diced stale bread in warm milk for 4 to 5 hours.

  2. Squeeze out the excess milk and mash the bread with a spoon.

Mix and cook

  1. Mix in the butter, sugar, salt, egg yolks, currants, and rich milk or cream.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered tin mold set in water or a buttered double boiler.

  3. Cook for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Turn out the pudding and serve with cherry 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. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Its dry, porous crumb soaks up milk and gives the pudding its body.
Egg yolks
They bind the soaked bread and set during cooking to give a custard-like texture.
Milk
Provides the liquid that softens the bread and keeps the pudding moist.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving a softer, more tender texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pudding brown lightly as it cooks.
Currants
Add small pockets of sweetness and fruit flavour throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Cook the pudding gently in a water bath. Egg yolks set at moderate heat. Cooking in water or a double boiler keeps the outer edges from overheating, which would otherwise make the custard grainy or rubbery.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, butter, sugar, 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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