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Dessert

Steamed Bread Pudding

A steamed pudding made from bread crumbs, sugar, butter, milk, eggs, and baking powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Steamed Bread Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the batter

  1. Mix the bread crumbs and sugar together.

  2. In a saucepan, heat the butter in the milk until it boils.

  3. Pour the boiling milk and butter over the bread crumbs and let it steep for a while.

  4. Beat the eggs and yolks together, then mix them into the bread mixture along with the baking powder.

  5. Beat the mixture for 2 to 3 minutes.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam in two buttered molds for about 1 hour or a little longer.

  2. Serve with hard sauce, meringue sauce, butter sauce, or maple syrup.

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. Butter + milktop 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. 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

White bread crumbs
Form the bulk of the pudding and absorb the milk to give it body.
Eggs
Set during steaming to bind the pudding and give it a tender, custardy structure.
Egg yolks
Add richness and fat, making the texture smoother and more tender.
Milk
Softens the bread crumbs and provides moisture for a moist interior.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a softer, more tender crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and helps keep it moist.

The step that matters

Steaming the molds. Steam must be kept gently and steadily going for the full time so the eggs set evenly through the pudding. Too little heat leaves the center wet, while boiling vigorously can make the texture coarse or porous.

“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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