My Grandmother’s Ginger-Jam Bread
and Butter Pudding


Nigella Bites: From Family Meals to Elegant Dinners --
Easy, Delectable Recipes for Any Occasion
© Nigella Lawson 2002, Hyperion

“This recipe comes from my maternal grandmother’s recipe folder, a wonderfully retro piece of design, circa late sixties, early seventies. Bread and butter pudding
has, I know, gone from stodgy disparagement to fashionable rehabilitation and back to not-that-again clichédom, but I am not prepared to let any of that bother me.
This version uses brown bread rather than white, and between the buttery sandwiches is heaped chunky-hot ginger jam, sometimes sold as ginger marmalade, but most usually, if quaintly, as ginger conserve; on top is sprinkled Demerara
sugar mixed with aromatically warm ground ginger, the spice of the old-fashioned English kitchen.
My grandmother, more austerely, used milk; I go for mostly cream: nothing creates
so well that tender-bellied swell of softly set custard.”

Serves 6

6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/3 cup golden raisins
3 tablespoons dark rum
10 slices brown bread
Approximately 10 tablespoons ginger conserve or marmalade
4 egg yolks
1 egg
3 tablespoons sugar
2 1/4 cups heavy cream
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons whole milk
1 teaspoon ground ginger
2 tablespoons Demerara or granulated brown sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Grease a pudding dish or shallow baking dish with a capacity of about 1 1/2 quarts with some of the butter.
Put the raisins in a small bowl, pour the rum over and microwave them for 1 minute, then leave them to stand. This is a good way to soak them quickly
but juicily.
Make sandwiches with the brown bread, butter and ginger jam (2 tablespoonfuls in each sandwich); you should have some butter left over to smear on the top later. Now cut the sandwiches in half into triangles and arrange them evenly along the middle of the dish. I put one in the dish with
the point of the sandwich upward then one with flat side uppermost, then
with point side uppermost and so on, then squeeze a sandwich triangle
down each side – but you do as you please. Sprinkle over the raisins and unabsorbed rum that remains in the bowl.
Whisk the egg yolks and egg together with the sugar, and pour in the cream and milk. Pour this over the triangles of bread and leave them to soak up the liquid for about 10 minutes, by which time the pudding is ready to go into the oven. Smear the bread crusts that are poking out of the custard with the soft butter, mix the ground ginger and Demerara sugar together and sprinkle this mixture on your buttered crusts and then lightly over the rest of the pudding.
Place the pudding dish on a baking sheet and put in the oven to cook for about 45 minutes or until the custard has set and puffed up slightly. Remove, let sit for 10 minutes – by which time the puffiness will have deflated somewhat – and spoon out into bowls, putting a pitcher of custard, should you so wish, on the table to be served alongside.
 

Custard

“If you are going to eat this sort of pudding, it can’t hurt to know how to make the custard to go with it. It is useful to know that you need 1 egg yolk for each 1/2 cup
of milk or cream. It’s harder to be precise about the sugar, which depends on your taste, what you’re eating the custard with and whether it’s going to be hot or cold.”

Serves 4

1 vanilla bean or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups light cream or half-and-half
5 large egg yolks
1 generous tablespoon sugar

Half-fill the sink with cold water.
If you’ve got a vanilla bean, cut it lengthwise so that the seeds will be released, and heat it in a pan with the cream till nearly boiling. Take off the heat, cover and leave to steep for 20 minutes. If you’re not using a bean, put the cream and vanilla extract on the heat, and beat the egg yolks and sugar together in a bowl. When the cream’s warm, pour it over the sweet yolks, beating all the while. Pour the uncooked custard back into the rinsed-out and dried pan and cook over a medium heat, stirring constantly, until the custard’s thickened. Ten minutes should do it, unless you’re being very timorous and leaving the flame too low. When the custard’s thickened, plunge the pan into the cold water in the sink and whisk it for a minute or so. You can eat it straight away, or if you want to make it in advance, reheat later in a bowl over a pan of simmering water.
 

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