CHAPTER 4

BREAD PUDDINGS

Bread puddings

They are versatile, our bread puddings. Bread-and-butter style puddings are baked, eggy bread puddings are fried, charlottes are either baked in a mould layered with bread, or left to set in a bread or sponge-cake casing. Summer pudding, for example, is made by putting berries – or other juicy fruits if you like – into a mould lined with thick slices of white bread. It is left to rest to soak up all the wonderful juices and is one of those puddings that used to be a popular dish to serve to those who were poorly.

As I mentioned in the introduction to the chapter on baked puddings, many bread puddings are baked, but not all of them are. That is why they get their very own chapter. I’ve chosen not to include puddings containing breadcrumbs in the bread pudding category, although they have been in the past. I do not believe that, for example, a carrot pudding – despite containing a large quantity of breadcrumbs – is a bread pudding. That pudding fits in much better with the baked pudding category.

To argue that bread puddings are called thus because they are a way to use stale bread is also not a requirement. Some puddings call for fresh bread or day-old bread rather than stale. When making bread puddings, the quality of the bread is paramount. I’m not being snobby here; if you make these puddings your bread shouldn’t contain any nasty additives. Flour, water, yeast and salt; that is all. If using brioche you are allowed some milk and sugar.

Back home in Flanders we only have one bread pudding, so if you speak of bread pudding, it always refers to that particular pudding. It is usually made by bakeries from their leftover bread. Raisins and spices are added, and the bread pudding gets a topping of chocolate or plain sugar icing. I used to love the bread pudding from our local market vendor; he made his bread pudding from leftover raisin buns and to this day I have never found any other bread pudding that can rival it.

The city of Aalst in Belgium also has a pudding that they call ‘vlaai’, which is in essence another word for pudding. They make this Aalster vlaai from old ‘mastellen’ (cinnamon buns), broken up and soaked in spiced milk, then baked. There is no bread involved, but one could argue that the peperkoek, which is a spiced cake similar to gingerbread, could in fact be categorised as a type of bread.

As with baked puddings, the oldest bread puddings were often prepared in a Dutch oven in the embers of a fire. The Devonshire white-pot is a prime example of that. Today and in the last century, the pudding was and is prepared in a regular oven. The result is scrumptious but I implore you to try placing the pudding in a Dutch oven on top of the embers of a barbecue. If you have a deep lid, you can place some of the embers on top of the oven so there is heat on top of the pudding too. The pudding that comes out of that cast-iron pot is the same, yet the fire and its unpredictable heat will caramelise sugars and maybe even slightly burn bits to give the pudding a rustic and primitive identity. In the oven it will bake nice and evenly, but in the fire it will get sudden kicks of heat and the dough will spring in the butter or fat making it look rather interesting and anything but uniform when you open the lid. As always, be careful with fire, but do give it a go to taste how this pudding might have tasted hundreds of years ago when we didn’t have the luxury of fancy ovens with thermostats.