Growing up in the 1930′s during the Great Depression, many Arkansans, like my grandparents, had to depend on creative means to make their money stretch and to make use of every scrap of food, material, or paper.  My Granny, Aline Cornett, did not come from a farming family.  She grew up along the banks of the Arkansas River in North Little Rock.  Her family didn’t grow their own food in groves like most.  She always talked about the struggle her parents had to feed the family and that her mom was very creative in the kitchen.

Granny said that unlike some of the kids she went to school with, her family couldn’t afford to make apple pies or peach pies or any pie there was to be made…..and cakes were a luxury in her family’s eyes.   Ice Cream was not even a possibility.  As she put it, the dirt around their home was richer than her family.

To satisfy the family’s sweet tooth, her mom would make bread pudding.  Using the scraps of bread or stale bread that was too hard to eat, she would create this moist pudding that smelled like cinnamon rolls from the downtown bakery.  The pudding was served as a dessert and even for breakfast.  Granny said she felt like the richest gal in town when she was served a hot bowl of bread pudding.  ”As the pudding melted away in my mouth, so did every care in the world,” she would tell us kids as she would stir the bread into the sweet milky liquid.

As my Granny aged, I began to ask for the recipe of her famous bread pudding.  She would say, “Little of this, a whole lotta that”  In other words there wasn’t a recipe to follow.  She knew it by heart and basically through together the ingredients.  I tried as hard as I could to reproduce that sweet sensational pudding.  Without much luck, the bread pudding I served was no match to hers.

Recently, I found a recipe that was published in our local newspaper.  A Debbie Goff from Bee Branch, Arkansas shared this recipe.  According to my dad, “This is as close as you will ever get to Granny’s bread pudding.”

This recipe is one of the foundations that brought my family together through hard financial times.  I, too, am making bread pudding and so, the tradition continues.

(Almost) Granny’s Bread Pudding

1/2 Cup margarine

1 3/4 Cups sugar

Ground Cinnamon or nutmeg or a combination, to taste

4 eggs

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 cups milk

4 or 5 slices of bread, cubed

Heat oven to 400 degrees.

Place margarine in baking dish and melt in oven.  Meanwhile whisk eggs, milk and vanilla.  Add sugar and cinnamon.  Add bread.  Pour into baking dish and sprinkle cinnamon-sugar over top.  Reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees and bake 45 minutes.

God  Bless…..

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