Category: bread pudding

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Secret recipes and the secret of recipes

Item number one: My old friend Jay came to visit a few days ago, brought the most delicious chocolate chip cookies, and sent me the recipe. It’s from Neiman Marcus, but it’s a real recipe for really wonderful cookies.

(If you’ve never heard the story–which is total urban myth–it involves a woman eating at the restaurant in Neiman Marcus, loving the chocolate chip cookies so much she asks for the recipe, only to be billed $250 or some such outrageous sum for it. Story is a complete fabrication.)

Item number two: In today’s New York Times Michelle Slatalla has a piece on neighbors trying to outdo each other with secret recipes for stuffed cabbage.

The confluence of those two items got me thinking about the whole idea of the secret recipe. Not a pretty picture. For two reasons.

Take one: Food is a basic need and also love made concrete. It’s nurturing, caring, the one indispensable thing we can offer someone else in true generosity. So the whole idea of withholding a recipe is so stunningly miserly when you think about it that it’s really not so far removed from bread lines and continents of starving children. The smallness of begrudging someone food–maybe especially delicious food–has implications of a world view that goes way beyond our little recipe files.

Take two: Just who is it who is usually seen as hoarding those secret recipes–or maybe giving out the recipe but with one vital ingredient missing? Women. Women whose place was so firmly rooted next to the stove that the secret recipe can be a stand-in for the miniscule power they had, the perceived value of what they had to offer in the world. Tiny scraps of yellowed paper. Tiny aspirations, truncated possibilities.

So, thank you to my friend Jay and to Neiman Marcus for the cookie recipe. Thank you, Marcie, for carrot pudding,; Caryl Kahn for peach pie; Fran for bread pudding and another Fran for Tuscan bread soup; my late neighbor Dan for country stew; my aunt Sara, gone for decades, whose noodle pudding recipe lives on and has now evolved to include one new ingredient suggested by my granddaughter. My recipe file is filled not only with foods, but with people, with their history, and with my ties to them. My thanks to you all: your generosity continues to sustain me.

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It’s a dessert, it’s a main course, it’s…bread pudding!

One of my favorite old-fashioned dessert recipes is nearly illegible, scrawled on a torn sheet of paper and labeled “Aunt Ethel’s.” I wrote it down fast during a phone conversation, intended to rewrite it later, and never did. It’s my friend Fran Godine’s family recipe for bread pudding, the basic vanilla-and raisins version.

I’ve been seeing bread pudding looking newly chic on restaurant menus lately in chocolate and toffee incarnations. And over the years I’ve cut out savory recipes with additions like mushrooms, fontina, and leeks that looked like good alternatives to quiches.

After a little experimenting I found that this is similar to an omelette in ease and in handiness for nights when you can’t think of what to make for dinner with the ingredients on hand. But it’s surprisingly light and almost souffle-like in its ability to look impressive. And it provides the perfect answer for what to do with the rest of a baguette after dinner for two.

So here’s the basic idea. I’ve found that the right ratio is 1 cup of milk (can be low fat) to 1 cup of staled bread cubes to 1 egg. For two people you’d probably want to use 3 cups to 3 cups to 3 eggs. And here’s what you do:
–scald the milk. That’s the term my mother used for heating it just until you get the film of protein deposits on the sides of the saucepan.
–beat in the eggs
–pour mixture over bread cubes. I like to mush it down a little to make sure all the bread is soaked thoroughly.
–add anything (see below)
–bake at 350 for about 45 minutes, or until a knife comes out clean. It will be puffed and much lighter than you’d expect.

For sweet bread puddings, you can add vanilla and raisins, chocolate….., maybe even the fruits you might bake into a pie–apples, pears, peaches.

But savory bread puddings are another whole level of flexibility. Mushroom, ham, grated cheese, green onions, tomato, broccoli–put in whatever you might use in a quiche.

And here’s what I love about the bread part. I like to use French bread, so whenever I have any left from a meal, I cut it into large cubes. I usually trim off the crust, but I’m not so sure that matters very much. Then I leave the cubes out to stale overnight and pop them into a bag in the freezer. What could be easier?

Let me know about your bread puddings!