Bread Pudding

Read Barbara's eMo for today, MARYBONE. Reader Danielle Juzan has sent in the following recipe. Thanks for the recipe and the story!

You'll probably get a dozen bread pudding recipes, but this is my favorite, from Alzina Pierce of the Bon Ton in New Orleans (reprinted in the redoubtable "La Bonne Cuisine," a community cookbook published by the ladies at All Saints, River Ridge). You have to make sure all the bread has soaked up egg or else there will be hard pieces in the pudding. I keep adding milk until it's wet enough.

Bread Pudding

1 loaf French bread
1 quart milk
3 eggs
2 cups sugar
2 tbs vanilla
3 tbs butter
1 cup raisins

Soak bread in milk; crush with hands until well mixed. Then add rest of ingredients except butter and stir well. Melt butter in bottom of thick pan,and bake till very firm. [350 for an hour or so] Let cool, then cube pudding and put in individual dessert dish; when ready to serve, add sauce and heat under broiler. Serve with Whiskey Sauce.

[this is where the recipe is no longer thrifty]

Whiskey Sauce

1 stick of butter
1 cup sugar - cream with butter
1 egg

Cook sugar and butter in double boiler till very hot and well dissolved. Then add well beaten egg and whip real fast so egg doesn't curdle. Let cool and add whiskey to taste.

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New Orleanians also use stale bread to make French toast, which as the tourists are told was quaintly called "Pain Perdu" or "Lost Bread" since the bread would otherwise be lost.

And everybody in the South grew up eating cold leftover grits sliced and fried in grease, long before anybody ever heard of polenta. One of my favorite memories is sitting in Emeril Lagasse's Nola restaurant, back when it was new and he was only a rising star. It was the first weekend of Jazz Fest, and the place was full of nothing but tourists. We could hear the pretty young waitress going from table to table repeating her spiel of the days' specials, which included shrimp in some kind of sauce served over grits. Over and over, the girl repeated earnestly, "...served over grits. They're kind of like polenta."