B&B Brilliance
Panettone pud
G’day here’s 31.
I have safely landed in Australia, my goodness you forget how long that flight is, but I’m here it’s not freezing and I’ve already hit up two new bakeries and visited an old favourite 10 William St for a bowl of delicious pasta (or two.) Got an action packed couple of weeks kicking off with a bake sale at Florian in Melbourne, think pissaladière, mango slab cake and cherry pie, then we have our Sunday lunch at No.7 Healesville. Back to Sydney for a very special dinner with lovely Danielle Alvarez at our friend Hussein’s restaurant South End in Newtown. Plus another bake sale at McCarrs, expect lots of tomatoes, stone fruit and custard.
One of my January highlights is panettone bread and butter pudding, perhaps the best type of bread and butter pudding. Although we did used to make a really naughty one at Violet which was pain au chocolat leftovers baked in a chocolate custard, phwoooaaar. We also made a tasty savoury one stuffed with cheese and veggies oh and lets not forget the mighty hot cross bun and butter pud, so many great options.
Bread and butter pudding goes back to 11th Century Britain, initially called “poor man’s pudding.” Made with stale bread that was then soaked in water to rehydrate it, sugar and spices were added and it was then baked. The addition of milk, eggs, butter and often raisins or currants were introduced later. A very thrifty way of using leftover bread, bread being a household staple but one of the most wasted items in today’s world.
There are many different relations of the bread and butter pudding, including French toast (eggy bread, poor knights of Windsor.) This is bread soaked in a custard mix then fried in a pan with butter, I’m not sure why it’s called French toast as it is not French at all ,it popped up in Ancient Rome originally, the French have their own version they call pain perdu (forgotten bread.) Then there’s the Spanish cousin Torrijas which has the crucial difference of being fried in olive oil.
