Bread and Butter pudding
Bread and butter pudding is a traditional British pudding. I've found that people often say they don't like bread and butter pudding as it is traditionally made with raisins, which go soggy in the milk. So don't put raisins in!
This is my version (without raisins, and so not traditional).
Ingredients
4 slices white bread
2 eggs
milk
sugar
butter
marmalade or lemon curd
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Equipment
knife and board for cutting bread
knife for spreading butter, etc.
fork or whisk
sieve (optional)
casserole
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oven: then
time in oven: 40 mins
preparation time:
cutting bread
spreading butter etc.
mixing eggs, milk and sugar
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This is a minimal recipe. At the end, I suggest some additional or substitute ingredients.
Cooking process
- Cut 4 slices of bread. Spread butter on each slice. Cut off the crusts.
- Whisk the milk, sugar and eggs. This doesn't have to be very thorough; using a fork should be enough. You can sieve the mixture to remove the little eggy bits if you want.
- Spread one slice of bread with marmalade. Cut it into a few pieces and lay it in the casserole. Continue with the other slices, except the top layer should not have marmalade on it.
- Pour the milk, eggs and sugar mix over the layers of bread.
- Put the casserole in the oven without a lid. This needs to cook for about 40 minutes at . If it still looks a bit pale, put the heat up to and cook until brown. It should be crispy on top and soft inside.
Other ideas
Some of the following ingredients are traditional and some are possible variations.
- The traditional bread and butter pudding does not have marmalade, and has raisins or even sultanas instead. These are scattered between the layers. The ones between slices go soggy and the ones on top go crisp or even burnt.
- The amount of butter and marmalade is up to you. Just spread the amount that you would normally use to eat. Make sure you spread right up to the edges, though. You can use lemon curd instead of marmalade. I'm not sure about jam - it might go a funny colour, but I'm sure it would taste OK.
- You could try adding some spice. Cinnamon goes well with cooked bread. Nutmeg is a traditional spice for egg custards (and the base of this dish is really an egg custard, as it cooks egg and milk together). You could even try more exotic spices, like cardamom. Or perhaps some vanilla to the milk. However, I suggest that you try an unspiced version to start with before complicating the recipe. It is a surprisingly tasty dish by itself.
- I use normal British tinned loaf white bread (bought unsliced and sliced by me). The crusts of the bread are cut off and not used. Try giving them to any children around. For some reason, children who turn up their noses at crusts on their bread like eating the crusts by themselves after they've been cut off. Or you could eat them yourself, I suppose. In fact, I have ccoked this with crusts on, but you can see the crusts, which is a bit unattractive, I suppose. You can experiment with other types of bread. I've eaten bread and butter pudding made with panettone (Italian flavoured bread) which was delicious.
- My latest version of this used 2/3 single cream (half a pint) + 1/3 milk. I admit it was yummy! I tend to avoid mentioning cream in recipes, as it's another thing to have to buy (and more expensive of course). So this recipe certainly works using just milk (and semi-skimmed at that), but you can mix some cream with the milk if you want.
© Jo Edkins 2007 -