This Old Fashioned Bread Pudding is incredibly easy to pull together! You will love the rich, creamy texture of the pudding and the crunchy sweet topping! With or without a drizzle of hard sauce, this is a phenomenal dessert and a super easy way to use up older bread!
I am a bread pudding aficionado. If there is bread pudding on a dessert menu, I will order it without hesitation: it even trumps chocolate. Apparently bread pudding was one of those dessert staples in The New World, because there is at least one recipe in every heritage cookbook. My fiancé and I consider ourselves to be bread pudding connoisseurs – my ideal bread pudding is dense, but still fluffy, with discernable bread chunks, and a smattering of crunchy bread pieces on top. I like a hint of brandy in either the sauce or the pudding itself. Not picky at all.
I studied and compared over 15 different recipes before I settled on the recipe for the pudding and sauce below. I chose a recipe for the pudding from “American Cookery” by Amelia Simmons, the first American Cookbook. Up until Mrs. Simmons published “American Cookery” American housewives used English cookbooks, which didn’t include practical uses for the native flora and fauna of the New World. Mrs. Simmons book included “receipts”, or recipes, for this new civilization and recorded our fledgling culture for posterity.
Most of the recipes suggested that bread pudding be accompanied by a “Hard Sauce”. It is basically icing with liquor. Yum. I made the recipe from The Joy of Cooking (First Edition).
It took every ounce of will power within me not to soak the cherries in brandy before adding them to the pudding. If you are not trying to follow a heritage recipe to the letter, then I highly recommend doing this. Divine! I would then do a nice caramel sauce or a Hard Sauce made with 1 teaspoon of vanilla in place of the brandy.
Recipe
Old Fashioned Bread Pudding
Ingredients
For the Bread Pudding:
For the Topping:
For the Hard Sauce:
- ¼ cup butter (unsalted)
- 1 cup powdered sugar (sifted)
- 1 large pinch salt
- 1 tablespoon brandy (or more to taste. I used 2 T)
- 1 egg (see notes)
Instructions
Make the Pudding:
- Preheat oven to 325F. Adjust rack to the middle of the bottom half of oven.
- Butter an 8 x 8 baking dish. Distribute bread chunks evenly in the dish and sprinkle cherries evenly throughout the bread. Add Mix all ingredients after bread. Once completely incorporated, pour mixture over the bread & cherries.
- Cover dish and refrigerate for 20 minutes.
- Mix ingredients for topping and sprinkle over the top of the custard, pressing down slightly.
- Bake at 325F for 40-50 minutes or until custard is set. The top will brown and it will only jiggle slightly in the very center.
Make The Hard Sauce
- Cream the butter until it is very soft. Add the sugar gradually, then the salt and beat these ingredients until they have a smooth, soft consistency. I could not get my sugar to the desired consistency, so I used the back of a wooden spoon to press the butter and sugar together until they were smooth and soft. Beat in the brandy (and egg) and chill the sauce thoroughly.
- I used 2 tablespoons of brandy, which had a definite alcohol flavor. Every recipe I read said to chill “Hard Sauce” and serve it cold, but I found it unpleasant to eat chilled, so I warmed it up and drizzled it over the pudding. Much better.
If you are doing a lot of heritage cooking rosewater is a staple from the colonial era. It has since been replaced in American baking by vanilla extract. Rosewater is still popular in Indian dishes and you can often find it in the international isle of your grocery.
Just made a half recipe of the sauce to go with a fruity cobbler, ran out of vanilla ice cream, used while TBSP Brandy, wow, thank you!
Haha! Way to improvise! That sounds fabulous!
ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO I USED MAIDA HEATTER'S BOOKS THEY ARE GREAT! I HAD A HUGE COLLECTION OF
COOK BOOKS - FINALLY DOWNSIZED AND GAVE THEM TO MY SYNAGOGUE
THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME OF MAIDA HEATTER....AND I STILL USE MY JOY OF COOKING -
MY VERY FIRST COOKBOOK I RECEIVED IT AT A BRIDAL SHOWER 60 YEARS AGO
This recipe was awesome. It's so easy (just mix all the custard ingredients together versus other recipes where you cook here, pour there) and everyone loved it so much haha. I really wasnt expecting much because it's the first recipe I'm trying, but it was amazing! And everyone was saying it's the best B&B pudding they've ever had (: Thank you so much! 😀
It was deliciously rich, and yes everyone was talking about the crispy topping (:
Some changes I made: I added some baileys into the custard! And used another vanilla sauce because I prefer the more liquidy flowy kind (: But I'm sure yours would be amazing too 😀 And you're right about serving the sauce warm! (: Thanks again for the awesome recipe!
I'm so, so glad that you enjoyed it! It is certainly easy...once you get past cutting up all that bread! Any time I have a bread pudding without a crispy topping, it feels like something is missing. Mmmm baileys in the custard sounds delicious! I will absolutely have to try that! I prefer the liquid flowy kind of sauce too!
😀 thanks again for the great recipe! Will definitely go check out your others ^^
Thank you! I hope you do!
I love bread pudding too! Wonder how this would be with an alternative milk (almond maybe?)-- I'm somewhat lactose intolerant
I could see bread pudding working with almond milk, but I can't say I would want to try soy. Coconut could also be an interesting partial substitute. A lot of the richness comes from the heavy cream and milk, so you might want to add more cinnamon, nutmeg or allspice to yours. If you try it, let me know how it tastes!
I just made bread pudding using Almond milk. No particular recipe. Off the cuff. Hawaiian sweet bread, raisins, honeyed pecan bits. custard: Almond milk cardamom pods soaked in the hot milk with butter and a dash of vanilla. Since the Almond milk is sweet just a tsp of sugar. When still hot out of the oven drizzled with bourbon. So yummy! Plus very alcoholic hard sauce made also with Bourbon.