The Cure for White Bread Blues--Refrigerated Bread Pudding

I honestly try to avoid being a "food snob," but there really are a few foods out there that make me wrinkle my nose in disgust.  One of those foods is prepackaged white bread. I have no use for it. They say it has little, if any, nutritional value, and I much prefer the flavor of whole wheat or multi-grain breads.  So imagine my surprise when I came upon a half consumed loaf of generic white bread in the back of my freezer.  It had been left there by out of town friends who visited a few months ago.  They left it, no doubt, because they don't like wheat bread and they wanted to have it on hand for their next visit.

Sadly, one of them has been seriously ill for sometime, so it's probably going to be awhile before she's well enough for them to return.  In the meantime there isn't much left to do with that bread besides defrost it and use in some of the recipes I'm testing for Rosie's Riveting Recipes, the updated version of Anna's Kitchen, which will, hopefully, be out sometime in 2012.

I managed to get rid of four slices this morning testing the following bread pudding recipe.  It's a classic that your grandmothers may have made, and it tastes just as good today as it did in the 1940s.  One nice thing about many of these classic dessert recipes is that they are sweet, but not so sugar-laden that they knock you out.

REFRIGERATOR BREAD PUDDING

1 envelope plain gelatin
2 cups milk
½ cup light or dark corn syrup or 1/3 cup sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
4 slices white bread (2 ½ cups cubed)
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
nutmeg, if desired

Soften gelatin in ¼ cup cold milk. Scald remaining milk with corn syrup (or sugar) and salt in double boiler. Add gelatin and stir until dissolved. Remove crusts and cut slices of bread into cubes. Pour hot milk slowly over beaten eggs, stirring constantly. Return to double boiler. Add bread cubes and cook until custard consistency, stirring constantly. Remove from heat. Add vanilla and beat with rotary beater until frothy. Turn into one large (or individual molds) that have been rinsed in cold water first. Chill. When firm, un-mold and serve with cream or any sauce. Sprinkle with nutmeg.

Modern adaptation: Be careful not boil the milk. The beaten eggs can be slowly added to the milk mixture in the double boiler, stirring constantly as directed in the original recipe, until they are well blended. To give the pudding a bolder flavor add ¼ teaspoon ginger, ¼ teaspoon cinnamon, and ¼ nutmeg with the vanilla. The pudding can also be poured into ramekins and served with whipped cream, cinnamon, or nutmeg on top, as suggested in the original recipe.