#breadbakers - bread pudding (includes recipe): January 18 2019

I grew up in the time before food waste was invented. Every scrap of everything was used, and, if anything was left over, it was made into something else.

Butter papers were kept to grease and line cake tins, dripping was in a jar by the stove for frying (fabulous for chips) and stale, dry old heels of bread were kept until there was enough to make a bread pudding.

The rock hard lumps were sawn through with the bread knife to form fat uneven cubes, heaped in the mixing bowl and covered with water to soak until the bread was soft and falling apart.

Meanwhile, a little fat and sugar, a handful of raisins or sultanas, an egg if you had one, and half a teaspoon of mixed spice were gathered together and the oven put on a low heat.

The fat was always beef suet when I was a child, Atora suet in the stripy packet. Bread pudding was great for a large family: it was mainly bread with a little sweetening and some dried fruit here and there and a little fat to keep it moist. Very economical.

When the bread was well-soaked, the water was squeezed out and the other ingredients added, everything mixed with a very large wooden spoon or, possibly, your hands. When it was all combined, the mixture was poured into a large tin.

This is where the art comes in: the mixture was smoothed down to form an even layer and then you went back over the top creating deep furrows and grooves. During the long slow cooking the peaks and ridges became deliciously caramelised and crispy, asking to be torn off, and the valleys and troughs became the perfect receptacles for capturing the dredging of caster sugar.

Bread pudding smells delicious when its baking, helped along by the mixed spice. We would hang around, waiting for it to come out of the oven, crunchy and possibly even a little burnt around the edges, and a steaming hot, squidgy centre.

Mine tasted a little strange ... then I remembered I had included rye bread!

Bread Pudding

500g stale bread - best if you can include some wholemeal bread.
100g suet, margarine or butter (I've never tried vegetable oil).
100g granulated or demerara sugar.
100g dried fruit - raisins, sultanas.
1 egg.
1/2 teaspoon mixed spice.
Sugar for dredging.

Cut the bread into large (2cm x 2cm) dice, place in a large mixing bowl and cover with cold water. When the bread is soft and falling apart, strain into a colander and then squeeze the water out of handfuls before placing back in the mixing bowl. Add all the other ingredients and mix well, ensuring the bread lumps have broken down and combined with the other ingredients.

Place in a large tin (I usually line the tin with greaseproof paper - it makes it easier to lift the bread pudding out), smooth to an even layer and then rough the surface. If you are posh, make nice, even furrows, first one way and then cross ways the other, with the tines of a fork. If you are a little piglet, intent on lumpy bits of crunchy heaven interspersed with drifts of caster sugar, take a wooden spoon and mark deep troughs and ridges.

Place in the middle of a pre-heated oven at 160 degrees centigrade for about an hour, checking after 45 minutes. Depending on the thickness of your pudding and the temeperament of your oven, it may need an hour and a quarter. You'll know when it's done, when the top is brown and crunchy and the edges have shrunk away from the sides of the tin.

Leave in the tin for five minutes to firm, then lift out and place on a cooling rack. When cool, or at least cool enough to handle, dredge with sugar, cut into squares, make a cup of tea and enjoy. Some people serve bread pudding with custard as a dessert. I've never known it to last that long.

Sometimes I add left over under or over ripe fruit - bananas, apples and pears, plums - or the last bits and pieces of dried apricots or dates in the jar.

Walking