Bread pudding is a bread-based dessert popular in many countries' cuisines. It is made with stale bread and milk
or cream, generally containing eggs, a form of fat such as oil, butter or suet and, depending on whether the
pudding is sweet or savory, a variety of other ingredients. Sweet bread puddings may use sugar, syrup, honey,
dried fruit, nuts, as well as spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, or vanilla. The bread is soaked in the
liquids, mixed with the other ingredients, and baked.
Savory puddings like breakfast strata may be served as main courses, while sweet puddings are typically eaten as
desserts.
In other languages, its name is a translation of "bread pudding" or even just "pudding", for example "pudín" or
"budín". In the Philippines, banana bread pudding is popular. In Mexico, there is a similar dish eaten
during Lent called capirotada. In Liverpool in the United Kingdom, a moist version of Nelson cake, itself a
bread pudding, is nicknamed "Wet Nelly".
Bread pudding originated with 11th-century English cooks who repurposed leftover
stale bread. In the following
centuries, the dish became known as "poor man's pudding" because of the scarcity of food at the time, with the
pudding being made only with boiling water, sugar, and spices.
It was only in the 13th century that eggs and milk were added to the recipe, which then became known as "bread
and
butter pudding".
American bread pudding
The 18th-century English cookbook The Compleat Housewife contains two recipes for baked bread pudding. The first
is identified as "A Bread and Butter Pudding for Fasting Days". To make the pudding a baking dish is lined with
puff pastry, and slices of penny loaf with butter, raisins and currants, and pieces of butter are added in
alternating layers. Over this is poured thickened, spiced cream and orange blossom water, and the dish is baked
in
the oven. There is another version of the dish that is simpler, omitting the spices and dried fruits.
With the arrival of the first settlers in the 13 English Colonies in America, bread pudding became popular in
the
colonies and later in the United States.