Brioche Bread and Butter Pudding with Marmalade

Swapping ordinary sliced bread for buttery brioche turns the old nursery favourite into something altogether more luxurious: the enriched loaf drinks up the vanilla custard and bakes to a soft, almost cake-like richness. A thin layer of orange marmalade spread between the slices is the gentle twist, melting into the custard to lend a bittersweet citrus edge that cuts through all the cream. Golden and crisp on top, soft and trembling beneath, it is exactly the pudding I want at the end of a cold supper.

The story

Bread and butter pudding began life as a way of using up bread that was past its best, a frugal habit shared by any kitchen that hated waste more than it loved novelty. A close ancestor, the “whitepot”, appears in English cookery well before the modern version: it thickened milk with bread, eggs and dried fruit and was popular in Devon in particular. By the eighteenth century the recipe had settled into something recognisable — Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife of 1727 and Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery of 1747 both give versions of buttered bread layered with currants, soaked in a sweetened egg custard and baked. It belongs to the same resourceful family as the queen of puddings and summer pudding, dishes that quietly rescue leftovers and turn them into proper desserts.

The custard is the soul of the pudding, and the part most worth getting right. A blend of milk, cream, eggs and sugar, gently flavoured with vanilla, it bakes into a softly set cream that binds the bread together. The key number is temperature: egg proteins begin to set around 65 to 70C, and if the custard is pushed much past that it tightens, weeps and curdles into something grainy. Cooking the dish in a bain-marie — a roasting tin half-filled with hot water — buffers the custard from the oven’s direct heat, so the eggs set gently and evenly rather than scrambling at the edges before the middle has caught up. Warming the milk and cream before whisking them into the eggs helps too, giving a head start on cooking and a smoother set. Pouring the custard over and then leaving the assembled pudding to stand for a full twenty minutes is not optional; it gives the bread time to absorb the liquid all the way through, so there are no dry patches and no pool of unset custard at the bottom.

Straining the custard before it goes over the bread is a small step that pays off, catching any stray threads of egg white and the spent vanilla pod so the finished pudding is silky rather than speckled with tough bits. And whole milk and double cream are doing structural work as well as adding richness: the fat coats the egg proteins and raises the temperature at which they set, buying you margin against curdling. A pudding made entirely with skimmed milk sets harder and more sharply, which is why the recipe insists on both.

Using brioche is the indulgent modern upgrade. Because brioche is enriched with butter and eggs, it is softer and sweeter than a plain loaf and soaks up custard beautifully, baking into a tender crumb that feels closer to a baked custard cake than a thrifty leftovers pudding. A day-old loaf actually works better than a fresh one here — slightly stale bread has firmed up and drinks custard without collapsing to mush, which is the whole reason this dish exists in the first place. It is one of those simple substitutions that lifts a homely recipe into something you would happily set in front of guests.

Marmalade is the finishing flourish, and a very British one at that. Spread thinly between the layers, it melts as the pudding bakes and threads bittersweet orange and a slight chewiness through the custard. The fine shreds of peel keep their citrus bite, balancing the sweetness and richness of the cream. A scattering of demerara over the top caramelises in the oven to give a crunchy, golden crust, welcome contrast to the soft pudding beneath. If this marmalade-and-custard combination appeals, you’ll find the same bittersweet-orange thread running through vanilla orange French toast, which is essentially the same custard-soaked-bread idea taken to the frying pan for breakfast. And for another way with buttery enriched dough, the brioche feuilletée shows what happens when you laminate the loaf rather than simply bake it.

Where it can go wrong, and how to tell it’s done

The two failures worth guarding against are a curdled custard and a soggy middle. Curdling comes from too much heat: if the water in the bain-marie is boiling hard, drop the oven a notch, and don’t be tempted to crank it up to hurry the top along. A soggy middle comes from under-baking or from not letting the pudding stand before it goes in. The custard is set when the pudding has a gentle, even wobble across the whole surface — like a panna cotta, not like liquid — and a knife slipped into the centre comes out coated but clean. It will continue to firm up as it rests, so pull it while there’s still the faintest tremble in the middle rather than baking it to a solid block. Ten minutes’ rest out of the oven lets the custard settle and makes it far easier to serve in neat squares.

Substitutions and variations

Brioche is the luxurious choice, but the recipe is forgiving. Panettone, with its own dried fruit and citrus peel already built in, makes a spectacular Christmas version — reduce the sultanas accordingly. Croissants, torn and layered, give an even richer, flakier result. A plain white farmhouse loaf, well buttered, makes the honest, old-fashioned version your grandmother would recognise, and needs no apology. Whatever you use, day-old bread beats fresh.

The marmalade twist is where you can play. Swap it for apricot jam and a handful of chopped dried apricots for something softer and less bitter, or for good raspberry jam and fresh raspberries scattered through for a summer version. A tablespoon of whisky or Cointreau whisked into the custard suits the orange beautifully and makes it feel like a proper grown-up pudding. For a chocolate version, stud the layers with chunks of dark chocolate and leave out the marmalade; the chocolate melts into puddles that set as the pudding cools.

Make-ahead and storage

A longer soak, incidentally, is no bad thing. Where the twenty-minute stand gets the custard through the crumb, an hour or a night in the fridge lets it penetrate right to the centre of every slice, so the baked pudding is uniformly tender rather than firmer at the edges than the middle. This is the same principle behind soaking the bread for a French toast overnight, and it is why day-old brioche, already a touch dry, drinks the custard so willingly.

You can assemble the pudding, pour over the custard and leave it to soak, covered, in the fridge for several hours or overnight before baking — genuinely useful for a dinner, since it can go straight from fridge to oven while you clear up. Add five minutes or so to the baking time if it goes in fridge-cold. Leftovers keep, covered, for two days in the fridge and reheat well in a low oven, or even cold, sliced, the next morning with coffee. It does not freeze especially well; the custard weeps a little on thawing, so this is a pudding to make and eat rather than stockpile. Serve it warm, with cold cream poured over or a little extra marmalade melted into a loose glaze, and it does everything a good pudding should.