The saga of the lost bread pudding

Commander's gives you bread pudding and a hat on your birthday!

A few years ago, we splurged and went to Commander's Palace for Mr. G.'s birthday. They sat us in the garden room (which I always call the jungle room) overlooking ancient oak trees and they fed us bread pudding.

That bread pudding sparked a memory and created confusion all at once.

Granny Hebert (my mom's mom) used to make bread pudding. I can remember her kitchen down to the brown side-by-side refrigerator, the zillion cans of soup in the pantry (she grew up in the Depression) and the salt and pepper shaker collection. But I cannot remember how she made that bread pudding.

I don't think the woman ever wrote down a recipe in her life. And I don't remember any cookbooks among the romance books she favored. So she probably kept the recipe in her head.

Granny Hebert made the best bread pudding. 

Since Granny's death, I've looked at bread pudding recipes in puzzlement. None of them sparked even a vague memory. They just didn't seem right.

Then I tasted Commander's bread pudding, and a bell rang.

Commander's recipe is widely available on the internet. It's a complicated dish involving tons of eggs. I can't imagine Granny would've used a dozen eggs in a single recipe. She was a widow living on a very fixed income, and she didn't raise chickens.

So I asked the family for help.

My mother correctly pointed out that my Nanny (Granny's oldest daughter) would know the recipe. Sadly, Nanny is no longer with us.

My aunt said she didn't know the recipe.

They're a lot of help.

Finally, my cousin - who was Nanny's youngest daughter - offered the most helpful tips. She remembered some of the ingredients and that it had a meringue.

That's what was different about Granny's bread pudding. A lot of times, the bread pudding you get in a restaurant is a gooey dish of bread, fruit and milk. Granny's bread pudding - like Commander's - had a meringue on top. And it never had raisins.

I found this recipe on the internet, and it feels right. This is the poor Cajun's bread pudding (no offense to Commander's). No French bread. Certainly, no dozen eggs.

Give it a whirl:

Ingredients

• 4 slices of white bread
• 4 tbsp sugar
• 3 1/2 cup milk
• 4 eggs, separated
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• pinch of salt
• 1/2 stick butter
• raisins, optional

Directions

Break bread into an oven-safe dish. Soften the bread with small amounts of milk.

Beat the sugar and egg yolks together in a separate bowl. Add the remaining milk and stir well.

Then add vanilla and salt and pour the milk mixture over the bread. Add the raisins. Cut the stick of butter into chunks and mix in.

Place the dish in a pan of water inside of the oven and bake at 300 degrees for 40-50 minutes or until a toothpick or knife comes out clean.

For a meringue topping, add 2 level tablespoons of sugar a pinch of cream of tartar to each egg white and beat. Spread on top and bake at 350 degrees until the meringue is golden brown. Serve warm.

Get ye to York

York is seriously beautiful with river views, pubs, a cathedral and a coffee shop set inside the ancient city walls. 

It's been a few years since we visited England, and I never finished blogging about it. Lately, I've been watching the BBC series "North and South," which is set in the fictional Milton but makes me think of York.

Ah, York. Lovely, beautiful York. London is great, but York is something else.

For a newspaper reporter and a former newspaper reporter, this was an exciting sight. Alas, it no longer houses a newspaper. But how cool is this building? It overlooks the river in York. 

We walked this city (city centre at least), crossing the river multiple times across the many bridges, climbed the city walls, explored the area's chocolate history, found a favorite coffee shop, got lost in Marks and Spencer, took a ghost tour, waved at William and Kate, sampled the worst pie ever, wandered crooked streets centuries old and crashed a wedding. We also found time to venture by bus into the countryside where we rumbled past the ruins of Richard III's castle and squeezed through a wall in a bus packed with Japanese tourists to gape at the stateliest of homes.

So get ye to York if you have the time. And buy me a house there.

Harry Potter is alive and well in York. Seriously, there are wanted posters for him along the crooked streets that supposedly inspired Diagon Alley.

York is dripping in history.

For the Romans, York was Eboracum. The Romans turned York/Eboracum from a sleepy meadow into a city. We met some of the people who populated Eboracum at the Yorkshire Museum. They included this guy:

Constantius was York's forgotten emperor. You probably are more familiar with his son: Constantine the Great.

Near the museum are the ruins of an abbey.  As someone once wrote: "Here we must leave the venerable pile in the evening of its glory."

The ruins are pretty glorious. This was one of the wealthiest monasteries in England. It started tumbling down in the 1530s, when Henry VIII decided to get a divorce and started dismantling the Catholic Church's wealth and influence.

Remains of the Day: St. Mary's in York.

The Tudor influence still is felt in York. 

From history, we moved to chocolate. Yum! York easily could be home to Willy Wonka. 

There's a lot to do in York. We couldn't do it all. So I rattled off a list of options to Glenn. He picked the chocolate museum. This was one of our favorite things in York.

The Quakers brought chocolate to York. They thought it was better for them than alcohol. The River Ouse also helped since it provided a convenient means of transporting chocolate to the rest of the world. York brought you KitKat bars and those chocolate oranges you open with a whack at Christmas.

We learned all of this at the chocolate museum. And we got to make chocolate lollies (lollipops).

Our chocolate lollipops!

After our chocolate lesson, we wandered through York and got turned around. We looked up and found ourselves at the bottom of a steep hill topped by a castle tower. Somehow, we'd stumbled across Clifford's Tower. I imagine many a Yorkshire school child has rolled down that hill.

This tower was built by Henry III. The king and queen were supposed to stay here when they visited York. However, they rarely ventured that far north so the tower became a place to store valuables. 

As you can imagine, the view from atop this tower is spectacular.

The view from Clifford's Tower. 

From Clifford's Tower, we decided to walk the city walls. York City Centre is encased by ancient walls. In fact, the city boasts more intact walls than any other city in England.






Fun fact: the gateways in the walls are called bars. These are where the good people of York used to put the severed heads of traitors on pikes. You know, as a warning.


Glenn found a Yorkshire tap room near one of the bars. A bar near a bar.





We devoted nearly an entire day of our trip to York to a side trip to Castle Howard. I read about Castle Howard eons ago and always wanted to visit it. Turns out, you can hop on a city bus from York and eventually end up at Castle Howard.

The hotel desk clerk warned us it would be a boring ride through the country. As if! I was fascinated by a glimpse at life outside the City Centre: Stops at a massive strip mall where we collected passengers who got on with their shopping bags and departed at little villages.

Then we rolled past this:



This, my friends, was built when King Stephen was on the throne. Guess who slept here? Richard III. It was long thought that Richard's only legitimate son was buried in Sheriff Hutton, where this castle is located. That's been disproven.

Yep. Nothing interesting to see on that bus ride!

Finally, we arrived at Castle Howard, famous as the setting for "Brideshead Revisited." It's a house that makes you think of governesses and the moors and "Downton Abbey." We really wanted to move in. Bailey would have so much room to roam!

Castle Howard

There's recently been a dustup within the Howard family. The brother who'd been running the estate for decades was evicted in favor of an elder brother who previously chose not to take on the white elephant.

I didn't hear any family gossip on the tour. Instead, I encountered a lovely tour guide who once lived in Florida and attended exercise class with Burt Reynolds' blonde girlfriend. So much for butlers and governesses.

Velveeta sucks. My granny's cheese sauce doesn't

The other day, I bought a block of Velveeta.  I don't know what I was thinking either.

Actually, that's a lie. I know exactly what I was thinking.

My husband loves mac and cheese. While pushing my cart through the grocery store, I spotted the Velveeta and - in that haze of dubious recipe shortcuts that always seizes me at the grocery store - I picked up a box. The grocery gods convinced me it would melt beautifully and create glorious mac and cheese with ease.

Sanity quickly prevailed, and that heavy box of Velveeta stared at me every time I opened the fridge until I finally decided enough was enough. I opened the cardboard box, tore into the wrapper and looked at my block of cheese. It was the color of a traffic cone and very rubbery in texture. Could it actually be a traffic cone fashioned into a rectangle?

I was further dismayed when I read the instructions. I only needed a chunk of the stuff. That meant I had - oh, I don't know - 50 more chunks until it was gone.

Then I melted the Velveeta and discovered it really should only be used with Rotel to make dip. It does not make very good mac and cheese. There were complaints from the peanut gallery.

I kept the remainder of that huge block in the fridge for weeks. At various times, I contemplated Googling for Velveeta recipes or offering it to a neighbor with many kids (because kids will eat anything). Finally, reluctantly, I threw it in the garbage. It hurt. I hate waste. But I couldn't force the stuff on Mr. G. Milk products don't agree with me so it's not like I could even take one for the team on this one. Into the bin it went.

Now I'm back to making Granny's cheese sauce when Mr. G. wants mac and cheese.

For the record, I don't recall Granny ever making cheese sauce. I remember her spaghetti with the canned mushrooms in the sauce, her burnt meatloaf (it was delicious) and her bread pudding. But my mother insists the family cheese sauce recipe came from Granny.

To make it, you melt butter and add flour. Then you stir in milk (and dry mustard for some reason) and stir until the sauce thickens. Cheese comes next. It's gloopy, oopy and decidedly not Velveeta. Maybe I could package it and sell it as Cheese Sauce That Doesn't Suck.