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Dessert

Plain Bread and Butter Pudding

A custard-soaked bread pudding made with milk, sugar, eggs, nutmeg, currants, bread, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Plain Bread and Butter Pudding

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Sweeten the milk with the sugar.

  2. Stir in the well-beaten eggs.

Assemble and bake

  1. Cut slices of bread and butter.

  2. Layer the bread in a dish, scattering currants in between until full.

  3. Pour the custard over the bread.

  4. Bake for about an 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. 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. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + breadtop 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

Eggs
Set the custard, giving the pudding its structure as they cook.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, providing moisture and softness.
Bread
Soaks up the custard and forms the layered body of the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the milk and custard base.
Currants
Add pockets of sweetness and chewy fruit between the bread layers.

The step that matters

Pour the custard over the bread. The bread needs time to soak up the custard so it softens evenly. Eggs set as they heat, so an evenly soaked layer bakes into a smooth custard rather than leaving dry or runny patches.

Swap the currant

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

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

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