My mum and her sister Beryl were born about twenty months apart in Winchester and they were always very close. When they married, their husbands also became good friends, and had various adventures and scrapes – nothing dangerous or wrong, just silly adventures. I was born, and a year and four days later my cousin was born, and she and I were friends too. Our mums were very similar in many ways, and in one particular way – they were both excellent cooks and bakers. Neither of our families were very affluent, and certainly my dad grew all our vegetables and a lot of fruit, and mum (and her sister) made cakes and biscuits, scones and cookies, pies and tarts, jams and lemon curd as well as cooking lunch each day. When I’m together with my cousins, we find we have inherited many of these recipes and ways of cooking even though we have have developed our own ways of doing them.
We live on opposite sides of the country, but get together when we can, there is the annual Christmas party, ther are special anniversaries we celebrate, and we go away together around Easter time. There are five of us with our partners, and when away we take it in turns to cook, and we each bring cakes, biscuits, buns, scones to sustain us on walks and to accompany cups of tea and coffee. It may have been last year, or the year before, but one of the cousins brought a delicious squidgy, fruity, tray-bake kind of cake and I’m afraid I was rather greedy with it, it was just so tasty.
Lois: Mmmmm, this is so yum, it’s delicious! Can I have the recipe? What is it?
Cousin (as if I should know) : it’s bread pudding, what did you think it was?
Lois: bread pudding? What’s that? It’s certainly really nice!
Cousin (perplexed) : Well, it’s bread pudding, you know, bread pudding.
Lois (now also perplexed) : You mean bread and butter pudding?
Cousin repeats herself.
Lois (possibly reaching for another slice just to make sure): Well, how do you make it?
Cousin : surely your mum used to make it, she was a great cook!
The upshot of it was that sometime after this conversation and consumption of cousin’s delicious bread pudding which is not really a pudding but a sort of squidgy traybake full of dried fruit and spices – I obviously asked for the recipe. As with these things, cousin said she would try and find it and send it when we were home. Recently for some reason I remembered all about it, and coincidentally she messaged me about something else, so I asked and was sent the recipe. She sent pictures of it, handwritten ‘from about 40 years ago!’.
So today I had a go at making it. What I should have done was stick to it. Instead I improvised, and also, as I had rather a lot of stale bread (I don’t throw it away but stick it in the freezer to use it for something or another and I had amassed quite a quantity) I guessed rather than worked out the amount of other ingredients. I ended up with a massive quantity of bread soaked in fruit juice, defrosting raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries and blackcurrants (instead of sultanas) and had to guess thre quantity of butter and egg. I also had to guess how long to cook it for.
Bread pudding, not a pudding, should be rather like a dense fruit cake. My bread pudding was like a pudding made with bread, and even after extra time in the oven beneath it’s crusty top it was very soggy. It was however quite tasty, and we had it in bowls with custard.
Lois Elsden 