Dining with Delia: Day 3
Andy's preferred custard
My husband is all about loyalty. He truly believes (even sometimes as late as the last week in September) that the Red Sox will still be playing in October. He still avoids Florida because of the 2000 election results. And he’s not convinced the traditional English custard recipe I pulled from the voluminous Delia’s Complete How to Cook (Random House, 2009) pages is any better than the dessert sauce made from Bird’s Custard Powder that he grew up on.
Bird’s is an off-white, egg-less dust with an ingredient list comprising corn flour, salt, colour, annatto (a natural red/yellow dye) and flavouring. You mix it with a bit of sugar and a lot of milk to get a thick, off-yellow cream that lifts up even the modest British pudding on offer. Bird’s – by its own marketing admission – is “the original custard brand, established in 1937 and loved by generations ever since.” (That a commercial brand, of course, since custard — sans the vanilla flavoring– can be traced back to the Romans’ sweets tables.)
Banana bread pudding with traditional English custard
Delia’s recipe yields a smooth, bespeckled, pale cream that starts with six egg yolks, two ounces of golden caster sugar, a spoonful of corn flour, and a pint of double cream that’s had steeping in it a vanilla bean — seeds scraped free and floating. Delia has you bring the vanilla cream to just beneath simmering and then slowly stream it into the eggs that have been beaten with the sugar and flour. You return the mixture to very low heat and keep stirring until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. (You can find the full recipe on Delia’s site.)
Andy is also very loyal to me, so he didn’t protest the homemade custard, at least not in front of our guests – one of them, an very animated 10-year-old, fresh from a three-week stay with relatives in France where his excitement for food was genetically reinforced, actually yodeled (he had a week in the Alps, too) when he tasted it. My husband, in fact, had several helpings of it poured over the banana bread pudding I made as the custard carrier. But he did pledge his undying allegiance to Bird’s.
While I like the Sox and understand the Democratic aversion to Florida, I disagree with him on this matter. I can pass on the Bird’s in most instances. But I’m sitting here snacking on a bowl of Delia’s custard (sans any type of pudding under it) as I write in the wee hours of the morning.
Banana Bread Pudding
The British’s definition of “mean” varies greatly from the American one. Over here the word means “thrifty”. In that spirit (and since I’d just spend five quid on the vanilla bean I needed to make the custard), I looked to see what I had in the pantry to fit the underlying pudding bill. From the day old bread, very ripe bananas and an abundance of milk and eggs, I came up with this recipe.
Ingredients
Butter
7-8 cups of hearty day old bread, torn in bite sized pieces
3 ripe bananas, sliced
½ cup sugar, divided
4 eggs, beaten
3 cups of milk
Cinnamon
Ground cloves
Method
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Use the butter to coat the bottom and all sides of a 13-by-9 glass or earthenware dish.
In a large bowl, mix bread, ¼ cup of sugar, bananas, eggs, milk, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and ½ teaspoon cloves and stir completely. Pour mixture into prepared dish.
Mix ½ teaspoon of cinnamon with ¼ cup of sugar. Sprinkle cinnamon sugar evenly over the pudding.
Place dish inside a large, rectangle roasting pan. Fill the roasting pan with water so that the water level goes about ¾ of the way up the sides of the pudding dish. Cook in the water bath for about 50-60 minutes until the top is nicely browned and the middle is set.
You can serve this warm or at room temperature. I suggest Delia’s custard as a perfect sauce, but Andy is sticking to his Bird’s. (To help buy your vote, I’m sure he would be happy to bring some back for you if you can’t get it at your local grocery.)
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