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Dessert

Bread Pudding

A sweet pudding made from stale bread soaked in milk, eggs, sugar, lemon peel, raisins, currants, and butter, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Bread Pudding

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Break up the stale bread into a dish and pour enough boiled milk over it to soak.

  2. Cover and let it sit for 15 minutes.

  3. Beat the soaked bread into a fine pulp, stirring in the butter.

Make the batter

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and add sugar and grated lemon peel to taste.

  2. Mix in the raisins, currants, and salt with the bread mixture.

  3. If necessary, add a little milk to achieve a thick batter consistency.

Bake

  1. Butter your baking dish, pour in the pudding mixture, and bake for 30 minutes.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Raisin + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

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 milk and setting into a soft crumb.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and set during baking to give the pudding its custard-like structure.
Boiled milk
Softens the bread and adds moisture so the pudding stays tender.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the pudding a softer, more tender texture.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy pockets of fruit throughout the pudding.

The step that matters

Beat the soaked bread into a fine pulp. Bread that is only partly broken down leaves lumps and uneven texture. Thorough beating lets the bread absorb the milk evenly, so the eggs set into a smooth, uniform pudding.

Swap the currant

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

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

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