Bread pudding
"The possibilities for the dish are endless, because cooks can vary the type of bread and any ingredients they choose to add." Joanne McFadden, The Daily Gazette.
I can't remember how we got on to it but my sister and I were reminiscing about a particular family story which poked gentle fun at my dad who once made a bread pudding but omitted to include all the things that made it tasty - dried fruit, sugar, spices ... It looked good but it was horrible. So then we tried to remember how my mother made it and couldn't really. We loved my mother's bread pudding. So I decided to investigate.
I should make clear here that I am talking about bread pudding, not bread and butter pudding which is extremely trendy at the moment and a different thing. Mind you some of the recipes I found for bread pudding seemed slightly more like bread and butter pudding than bread pudding.
After a bit of investigation I decided that my mother must have made hers based on Mrs. Beeton's recipe. Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management was, I think, the only recipe book my mother had - although we - she and I - also explored recipes published in women's magazines. She did not have a cookery book collection though. I guess people didn't in those days. And isn't it curious how a book written in the nineteenth century could still be used in the twentieth century. Anyway, here is Mrs. Beeton's recipe. Various parts of it ring a bell with me, - beating the mixture with a fork, soaking the bread in water ..., which is why I think this is the version my mother used.
BREAD PUDDING BY MRS. BEETON
8 ozs. of stale bread, 4 ozs. of raisins or currants, cleaned and picked, 2 ozs. of finely chopped suet, 2 ozs. of sugar, 1 egg, a little milk, a good pinch of nutmeg.
Break the bread into small pieces, cover them with cold water, soak for 30 minutes, then strain and squeeze dry. Beat out all the lumps with a fork, and stir in the sugar, suet, raisins, nutmeg and mix well. Add the egg, previously beaten, and as much milk as is necessary to make the mixture moist enough to drop readily from the spoon. Pour into a greased pie dish and bake gently for 1 hour. When done, turn out on to a hot dish, and dredge well with sugar.
And while we are on the old-fashioned versions - I also searched my cookery book collection and found that even Elizabeth David in her massive English Bread and Yeast Cookery did not have a recipe for Bread Pudding. But then I guess her emphasis was on making bread, not what to do with it when you had some leftover. But my The Best of Eliza Acton did. Her version is a little more lavish than Mrs Beeton's, and it's also boiled rather than baked. Which is another reason I think our childhood version was Mrs. Beeton's because ours was baked. I think she lived slightly before Mrs. Beeton. The first half of the nineteenth century rather than the second. Maybe they were a little less frugal then.
BREAD PUDDING BY ELIZA ACTON
Sweeten a pint of new milk with three ounces of fine sugar, throw in a few grains of salt, and pour it boiling on half a pound of fine and lightly-grated bread-crumbs; add an ounce of fresh butter, and cover them with a plate ; let them remain for half an hour or more, and then stir to them four large well-whisked eggs, and a flavouring of nutmeg or of lemon-rind; pour the mixture into a thickly-buttered mould or basin, which holds a pint and a half, and which ought to be quite full; tie a paper and a cloth tightly over, and boil the pudding for exactly an hour and ten minutes. This is quite a plain receipt, but by omitting two ounces of the bread and adding more butter, one egg, a small glass of brandy, the grated rind of a lemon, and as much sugar as will sweeten the whole richly, a very excellent pudding will be obtained; candied orange-peel also has a good effect when sliced thinly into it; and half a pound of currants is generally considered a further improvement.
Then we go to the modern day. Sticking to the British - well I did think this was a British dish - although apparently it has been doing the rounds of the world since the 12th century in various different forms - well it's a good way of using up stale bread - sticking to the British, the ever reliable Delia and Nigel Slater have recipes and also Nigel Slater's co-Guardian writer, Dan Lepard but Jamie Oliver and Nigella do not. Here are pictures of the two Guardian versions. Ours was browner than Nigel Slater's - the one on the left, but he does say you can cook it longer to make it browner. Delia's version looks pretty much like the one I remember.
“I don’t really have a favorite; I just play with what’s around on my shelf crying out, ‘Make me into bread pudding!’ ” Portia Little
Then I found an article in The Daily Gazette that talked about 'the bread pudding queen' Portia Little, who has collected nearly a thousand bread pudding recipes and published them in a book. Joanne McFadden who wrote the article says,
"Little has high praise for bread pudding because of the creativity one can employ in making it. “Find a basic recipe that works well for you, and just add items from your shelf such as cereal, nuts, granola, canned or dried fruit, marshmallows, cookie chunks and ice cream sauces,” she said. Once, Little even made bread pudding with leftover Halloween candy bars crushed into chunks — the perfect bread pudding for a chocoholic, she says."
And that can lead to very high class versions of this ancient poverty food, such as the one shown below. So long live bread pudding. Now what about bread and butter pudding?
