Baking - pictures.

[curiouswombat]

I have a couple of pictures to go with yesterday's recipes. But first - bread pudding vs bread and butter pudding.

In the parlance of most of Britain, these are not the same thing. And it seems as if North Americans call what we know as Bread and Butter Pudding, Bread Pudding. It's another of those food conundrums like biscuits...

The dish made with sliced bread, buttered and layered, usually with some type of fruit addition, then covered with egg custard mixture and baked until the bread crisps and the custard sets, is known to most of us over here as Bread and Butter Pudding. Here is a basic recipe with picture.

Bread pudding is made by taking stale bread, breaking it into chunks, and soaking it in milk, or even water, for a while. Then squeezing out the excess fluid, adding spices, sugar, an egg, and dried fruit, pressing it into a baking tin and baking it. Here is a recipe and picture of Bread Pudding. Bread pudding is eaten in a hunk like cake rather than with a spoon!

As for Wet Nelly - this was made like bread pudding - except left over cake was used and so it needed less soaking, more just damping down. Then, at least at our local bakery when I was a child, this mixture was baked between two layers of shortcrust pastry, and sprinkled with sugar. So - it was recycling old cake into new!

Anyway - pictures of fruitloaf and gingerbread

The problem is that two different brown cakes looks rather boring...




Even when you get closer to them...



But they do taste good!

Comments

[willowgreen.livejournal.com]

Actually, what most people in the U.S. call bread pudding is a combination of your two recipes, although closer to your bread-and-butter pudding. In its simplest form, American bread pudding is made with stale bread, cubed or broken into small pieces, NOT buttered, soaked in mixture of eggs, milk, sugar, and flavoring -- usually vanilla and/or cinammon -- and then baked. Raisins are an optional addition. Then there are all kinds of variations -- my sister-in-law makes a fantastic pumpkin bread pudding with caramel sauce at Thanksgiving, and I sometimes make one in which French bread cubes are toasted with butter in the oven, then combined with homemade applesauce and a custard mixture and baked. Good thing I'm stuffed from our Superbowl party or I'd want to go make that one right now.

I've seen recipes for bread-and-butter pudding very much like the one you linked to in American cookbooks -- there's one in my '70s Fannie Farmer, which is based on an old New England cookbook -- but I've never tried it myself or even seen it on a restaurant menu. And I don't think I'd ever even heard of bread pudding made without eggs until you posted about it! So many baked goods, so little time...

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Yes - we realised, after Binkie mentioned bread pudding and someone in the US clearly meant the version with the egg custard mix, that you version was closer to what her and I call bread and butter pudding.

There are so many variations world-wide but then I guess this is not surprising as they are all ways of using up left-over bread of one sort or another in one way or another!

So the idea or pumpkin bread is alien to me - but adding mincemeat would probably seem as odd to your sister-in-law.

The reason that the UK custard-based version is made with buttered bread is because it will have been made with left over bread from tea-time - so already buttered. The butter would make the custard richer as, in the everyday version, there would not have been cream.

And now I want to try your variant with stewed apple! As you say; so many baked goods, so little time...