Here’s an extremely healthy British dish along the lines of spotted dick. But without the childish humour. And with more butter.

What’s Bread and Butter Pudding?

It’s a layered bread dessert with lots of butter and raisins. Custard is sometimes added to that lot and then it’s all baked in the oven.

Spices such as nutmeg and vanilla also make the thing more tangy.

And then you eat it. And it’s very tasty. What does it taste of? A kind of greasy comfort food with subtle hints of spice (and butter). Nice! But unhealthy.

How Do You Bake Bread and Butter Pudding?

Human female chef Nigella Lawson provides the nitty, gritty details above. With lots of knowing looks to the camera.

It’s actually pretty straightforward. You just need lots of bread and butter. But the complete ingredients list includes:

25 grams of butter

8 thin slices of brown bread (don’t use white bread, you idiot)

50 grams of raisins

2 tablespoons of cinnamon

350 ml of full-fat milk

50ml of double cream

2 free-range eggs

25 grams of granulated sugar

Nutmeg

You cobble that lot together and voila! You have one of the tastiest, but most insanely unhealthy, desserts ever!

A Brief History of Bread and Butter Pudding

The dish went by the name of whitepot for a fair old while. Bone marrow was one of the main ingredients to begin with. Marvellous…

Eliza Smith was a popular 18th century cook and she mentions the dish for the first time. That was in The Compleat Housewife—a 1728 cookbook.

And, no, that’s not a typo. We guess that’s how people used to spell “complete” back then. Freaks!

100 years later, another Eliza (Eliza Acton) provided an alternate version in 1845. Such as chucking a bit of lemon rind in there.

Regardless of what you chuck in, the dish does have some popularity outside of Blighty. In America, we believe it has the name Cold Bread Pudding.

And in Egypt there’s a similar recipe that locals call Om Ali. Well… whatever, we prefer bread and butter pudding. God save the Queen!