Bread pudding is awesome, and raisins elevate it to greater heights of awesomeness. Optimally, the raisins need a pre-soak to plump them up before they’re added to the pudding. Little stuff like that is what changes good to great.
Bread pudding: is this strictly an American (USA) thing?
Serious question.
(I’ve never had it, but we were never dessert people.)
It’s okay but it’s never the best option. I’d rather have French toast.
It’s one way of using up stale bread. I wouldn’t say Americans were any thriftier than anyone else. I would rather have meatballs, myself.
Good bread pudding is amazing. Sadly, not all bread pudding is good.
Yesss!!!
As for bread pudding being American? I’ve had it in Latin America where it’s known as budin de pan (literally bread pudding)
According to this site in the UK, the type that Americans like is what Britons call “bread and butter pudding”, and UK bread pudding is drier
Aunt Rosa's British Bread Pudding, not to be Confused with Bread and Butter Pudding - Christina's Cucina
Here’s a BBC recipe that calls for the pudding to be cut into square slices when cooked; from the picture it looks like a dry cake.
YES, bread pudding is where it’s at.
I have never met a bread pudding I didn’t like. It’s just hardly available here.
Bread pudding is often served with some kind of hard sauce. I found a bread pudding at a grocery store bakery but didn’t want to hassle with making a sauce, and was inspired. Eggnog flavor ice cream is the perfect replacement for hard sauce on a warm dessert. I’ve only seen it available during the winter holiday season, but is also perfect for the mincemeat pie I must have at Thanksgiving. And I don’t have to buy a bottle of liquor that will sit in a cabinet for a year, or cook.
^ You. Are. A. Genius.
Approved by SDMB! My weekend is made!
I love it, but no raisins. I’ll eat it with the raisins, but when I make it, no raisins.
There’s variants of it across a wide spectrum of cuisines. Wikipedia claims its origins are English, but I imagine pretty much any culture with bread will have come up with some sort of bread pudding as a use for stale bread at some time. (The Polish version, for instance, is not baked, but made with bread, poppy seeds, sugar, and milk and then maybe nuts, raisins, a liqueur of some sort, butter, cream, honey, etc. Not necessarily all or even most of those. The simplest kind could just be the basic four ingrients.)
That sounds wonderful. I have a bag of frozen artichoke bases, might try combining with a torn up sourdough boule, some chopped bacon, some chopped brie and egg custard [fines herbes blend for seasoning with some cracked black pepper and maybe minced garlic]
What is the recipe you use for your artichokes in egg and cream?
I had a fire in my house seven months ago, and we STILL don’t have a functioning dining or living room, and 50% of my cookbooks are in storage. If it helps, it’s from 1984’s THE VOGUE COOKBOOK (don’t judge me; I bought it secondhand):
I remember only beaten eggs with light cream, salt and pepper, and artichoke bottoms baked *en casserole * in a slow oven until the custard set. Maybe you can call it up online. It’s the very first recipe in the legumes chapter.
Inspired by this thread, I had to make bread pudding today. Excellent stuff.
I voted no, but that’s because I know I’ve had it before, but I can’t remember what it was like. That tells me I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it either. I’ve had bread pudding at least two or three times, so it’s strictly meh to me.
Nope, definitely not.
<Strikes DS off his list of people to get recipes from.>
Ages ago, Joe Sagreto, founder of the New Orleans School of Cooking, was giving cooking demos/lectures aboard the Delta Queen on a Thanksgiving cruise from NOLA to Natchez and back. One of them was on bread pudding and he asserted that so many restaurants in the Big Easy offer it because they’re trying to compete with a lot of grandmothers. He then said, “I used to say that you could make it out of anything but…” and launched into an anecdote about how he gave a half dozen can’t miss recipes including bread pudding to a friend who’d signed on as cook on an oil platform in the Gulf – there’s no place to hide from a crew angry at the cook. A month later he was back.
“So how’d it go?”
“Wonderful! They loved this and that and the other thing.”
“…but not the bread pudding?”
“Well, you said you could make it out of anything, right?”
“…Yeah?”
“Well, I had some left-over jalapeño cornbread. They’d get a raisin on one side and a bit of jalapeño on the other and I think it confused 'em.”
About then a woman in the audience piped up, “How about an egg and cheese base instead of egg and cinnamon?”
“Hmmm…” and you could see the wheels turning in his head.
I was all-in on using the jalapeno cornbread until you mentioned raisins.