Bread Pudding

Bread pudding is one of the oldest dishes in English cookery, a thrifty use of stale bread that predates the more delicate bread-and-butter pudding by centuries. Medieval and Tudor English recipes describe a thick 'pottage' of bread, milk, eggs, suet and dried fruit, spiced and baked or boiled into a solid, sliceable mass; by the 18th century the dish had taken its modern form of a dense spiced loaf studded with currants. It is distinct from bread and butter pudding, which layers buttered bread with custard and is a much later, lighter invention. Bread pudding was a staple of the Victorian poor and of school and institutional kitchens well into the 20th century, valued because it converted a stale loaf and a handful of dried fruit into a filling pudding for a crowd. It is heavily spiced with mixed spice or nutmeg, dense enough to be eaten in slices with the hands, and keeps for days.

A dense, moist, sliceable square, heavy with bread and studded with currants, perfumed with mixed spice and nutmeg, the top crusted with sugar. Eaten with the hands or with butter; nothing like a soft custard pudding.

The pudding works by reconstituting stale bread into a solid mass. Stale bread, crusts and all, is soaked in warm milk until fully soft, then squeezed and broken up, the texture must be pulpy with no hard lumps. The pulp is bound with beaten egg, melted butter or shredded suet, brown sugar, a heavy hand of mixed spice and nutmeg, and a generous quantity of currants and sometimes chopped peel. The mix is thick, almost dough-like, and is pressed into a lined roasting tin, the top dusted with more sugar, and baked at a moderate temperature for about 90 minutes until set and crusted. The high bread content makes the result sliceable and dense, quite unlike a custard. Resting overnight improves the spice penetration.