Bread Pudding
Delightful Bread Pudding – not to be confused with its richer cousin, bread and butter pudding – is another way to use up stale bread.
As my Grandad pointed out to my Mum, the addition of dried fruit, butter, sugar, eggs and spices makes it a very expensive way of using up cheap stale bread, but it is delicious and filling. Just the thing to plug the vast, bottomless hunger hole that inhabits the space between coming home from school and eating dinner.
Speaking of children, this is a really good recipe for kids to make – the tearing of bread is laborious, but passes more quickly with someone chatting to you, little hands are good at squeezing water from soggy bread and they can beat it half to death with a wooden spoon because you can’t overmix bread pudding.
Interestingly, Grandad’s recipe book lists the recipe as a hot pudding to be eaten with custard, but we never ate it this way; no, it’s strictly left to cool and cut into slabs to be devoured as you would a piece of cake. A very substantial piece of cake, mind you, but still that’s our eating method of choice.
Yes, it’s a good rainy day recipe and it’s decidedly Autumnal here now. Sad for us to bid farewell to hot days, but great for good traditional bread pudding!




