Baking experiment yields simple, cheap dessert dish

Some of the best tasting dishes are the simplest. Sally Enman of Bangor wrote, “I’m hoping you can help me find a recipe my mother used to make. I’m thinking it had 8 slices of white bread (crust removed), applesauce and butter spread on the top layers of bread, baked in the oven. She put whipped cream on top. There were not many ingredients, and it was inexpensive to make. I can remember we used to have this for a dessert when I was younger, right around 1955.”

I had a hard time at first trying to visualize this dish. Kathy Hayes in Belfast wrote that her mom had this recipe in her 10th edition of good old “Fanny Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book.” I rooted around in my old cookbooks looking for other versions with no luck. So I decided I would just give it a try and see what happened.

The Farmer recipe says, “Put a layer of applesauce in a shallow baking dish.” We still have apples so I made some applesauce, and since we are chunky applesauce kind of people, I left some skin on and cooked it up until it was lumpy, sweetening it with unrefined sugar. I put a couple of cups in the bottom of a 9-inch pie plate.

“Remove the crusts from sliced dry bread. Butter the bread, cut in triangles and put over the applesauce, close together.” Well, I found some fairly firm white bread at the store, cut off the crusts and cut it in triangles and let it sit in the oven a little while just to dry out. If I had stale bread, I would have used that. Then I buttered them very lightly on one side and laid them on top of the sauce.

Farmer says, “Sprinkle generously with sugar and a few drops of vanilla or a shake or two of cinnamon.” I figured, “Heck, just sprinkle cinnamon sugar on it,” and I also dashed liberally some raw sugar over it. “Bake at 350 about 30 minutes or until the top is brown. Serve with cream, plain or whipped.” So I did. I hauled it off to a friend’s house and we had it for dessert, and there were all these “ummm, ummm” sounds around the table. But I thought the applesauce layer was kind of thin.

For the second experiment, I made the applesauce again, but I ran it through my food mill so it was more like the commercial stuff. I also used only white sugar to sweeten it and increased the applesauce to 4 cups. This time I pushed the bread down into the sauce a little, then cinnamon sugar on top. It was delicious.

The next time I make this for our little household though, it is going to have four cups of chunky applesauce, and I’ll use the raw, turbinado sugar on top because I love the way the big crystals go crunch when you bite them. And wouldn’t local maple sugar be nice?

I am so glad Sally asked for this recipe. I would never have dreamed this one up on my own, and it is really good.

Applesauce Bread Pudding

Makes 4-5 servings.

4 cups of applesauce, your choice, sweetened to taste

4 slices of slightly dry white bread, crusts cut off

Butter

Sugar and cinnamon to taste

Grease a 9-inch pie plate or square baking dish. Spread the applesauce in the dish. Butter the bread and cut it into triangles (optional), lay them on top of the applesauce and gently press them into the sauce without submerging them. Sprinkle cinnamon sugar over all, to taste. Bake for 30 minutes in a 350-degree oven. Let cool somewhat and serve with whipped cream.