The 30-Year-Old Bread Pudding

Once upon a time, there was a bread pudding that lived in a ... 

No, wait. Wrong story. This one is about a 30-year-old recipe. Approximately.

It was our first visit to the California State Fair: We were wowed by the exhibits, the farm animals, the model gardens in the ag area, the food contests (shucking corn, eating watermelon, etc., etc.), the performing artists ... so much fun for the price of an admission ticket! What really iced the cake, though, was the huge hall of county and manufacturer exhibits, because this hall was filled with FREEBIES! Counties decorated amazing booths and handed out goodies that represented their community: California Poppy seeds, prunes, Jelly Belly candies, and so on. Commercial manufacturers and trade organizations handed out free samples as well. We told the kids, "Who needs to buy anything on a stick from the food vendors? Go get those freebies!!"

One of the groups with a booth at the fair that year was the Bakery, Confectionery and Tobacco Workers International Union. Out of all the exhibits we visited that day, why would I remember this organization? Well, they handed out a free recipe, printed on a bookmark, for Old Fashioned Bread Pudding. To this day, I have it stuck inside the plastic cover of my overstuffed recipe binder. It's marked by splotches, and I've "lost" it a few times over the years, but that recipe has been in our kitchen and near my heart forever. 

Is it superlative? Inventive? Daring? Nah. It's just the first recipe I'd ever seen for a wonderfully comforting, homey dessert.

The weather is turning cool (huzzah!), and it's time for comforting, homey foods. Tonight I'm making Old Fashioned Bread Pudding - a dish that surely epitomizes thrifty homekeeping. You take stale bread, add milk, eggs and butter (which most homesteads had available, direct from the sources, back in the day), add sugar, salt, vanilla and goodies of your choosing (bananas, chocolate, dates, nuts, raisins), and bake it for an hour. 

My version is using stale whole wheat-walnut-cranberry bread that my husband made last week. (Yes, made!) I crumbled more than 2 cups' worth and soaked it in a mixture of slightly post-dated 2% milk and the tag end of a carton of vanilla almond milk.

Thanks, o bread maker of mine!

2% cow's milk mixed with vanilla almond milk

Note: Why do some recipes call for scalded milk? According to domestic doyenne Heloise, prior to commercial pasteurization of milk, scalding eliminated bacteria and kept the milk from thickening during the recipe's cooking. Now, even if the milk isn't raw, scalding it (heating it to just below boiling) helps melt butter or other ingredients that need melting. 

However, I've actually melted the butter in the microwave in a Pyrex bowl, because I'm being time thrifty: Instead of having to butter the bowl before baking, I can slosh the melted butter around the bowl before adding the butter to the pot of bread and milk. 

These are all from the same chicken flock. Isn't the size range wild? I call the little ones "starter eggs."

The eggs came from our cage-free chickens. (Yes, they have mud and poop on them. This happens more than you want to know. They get washed, but because the eggs have a natural protective coating on them, I prefer not to wash them until just before using them.) Tomorrow morning, the flock will get the leftover stale bread. :-) 

I've added raisins, even though the bread had dried cranberries. Bread pudding and rice pudding need raisins. The End. I've also stirred in a good amount of cinnamon. (If this were rice pudding, it would be nutmeg.)

Between the whole wheat and the dried fruit, this dessert should keep us regular. :-)

Here's what it looks like prior to baking. Porridge, anyone?

And here's the finished pudding. You know what would make a delicious topping? Whipped cream or ice cream or a fruit sauce. (Cue sound of grumbling stomach.)

Old-fashioned? Yes. Tummy-warming? Yes. Thrifty? Oh, yes. Simple? So simple.