A Pleasantly Wobbly Mass

Bread Pudding with Ceps and Radicchio

Appears in

Published 2018

About

On my one foray into private service, I was admonished by the son of the house for serving bread in a pudding. I had thought bread-and-butter pudding made with brioche was rather sophisticated. He pronounced, in a splendid echo of Marie Antoinette, that brioche was ‘a type of bread wasn’t it?’, and that they did not need ‘things made out of bread’.

His father, an immensely successful businessman with a love of frugality, would not have approved. He loved a good bisque because it demonstrated a prudent deployment of resources and liked bread pudding for the same reason. The best French and Italian cooks are on his side. Those of us who like a good panzanella, a pappa al pomodoro or even a soupe a l’oignon would concur. As a child I used to covet those dense slabs of dark and sweet bread pudding on the pastry shop counter, which were the thrifty baker’s response to leftover bread.