Pudding by Jeri Quinzio

Author:Jeri Quinzio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

7

Bread Pudding

Hurrah for puddin’-owning.

Norman Lindsay, The Magic Pudding, 2006

Bread pudding, usually thought of as a thrifty way to turn stale bread into an economical dessert, started out as a rather more elegant and expensive dish. The fourteenth-century French household guide Le Ménagier de Paris included directions for making a version called a taillis. A Lenten variety was made with bread and biscuits combined with raisins, apples, almond milk, saffron and sugar. It was not cooked: hot almond milk was simply poured over the bread and other ingredients and the mixture was left to set.1

By the seventeenth century, an English dish called a white-pot was being made with ‘fine’ (good-quality) bread, rich cream, eggs and spices. White-pots were distinguished by being baked instead of boiled in a bag like most puddings of their day. A Devonshire white-pot was so called because Devonshire was a dairy farming county known for its excellent cream. A typical white-pot recipe, from The Compleat Cook by Nathaniel Brook published in 1658, called for ‘a penny Loaf of fine bread sliced very thin’ along with cream, eggs, nutmeg, sugar, butter, salt and ‘a handfull of Raisins of the Sun’. Robert May had a similar recipe in the 1685 edition of The Accomplisht Cook but he added ‘pippins’ (a variety of apple) boiled to ‘pap’. May directed the cook to ‘cut some sippets [bread cut into small pieces] very thin and dry them before the fire’. When the sippets and pippins were ready, he layered them in a pan, poured on the cream mixture and baked it.

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