Doughnut Bread Pudding for Breakfasts at Events.

I'm always looking for reasonably priced dishes that give a good bang for the buck for any SCA event.  I don't have a lot of requirements, just that whatever is made tastes great, feeds the masses and has at least some sort of bearing on SCA life.

Hence doughnut bread pudding.

Now. this may not make any sense at all to the layman.  How can something that's become a fad for up and coming chefs of the 21st century have any sort of historical roots in our Current Middle Ages? Stick with me for a moment.

To start off with, doughnuts themselves as we know them today aren't even close to period. There are archaeological digs in different Native American settlements where breadstuffs were made in rounds with holes in them, sure, but the first thing we can really start pointing to in the doughnut lineage happens to be olykoeks - "oily cakes," as they came to be known.  They were created by Dutch immigrants and first appeared on the streets of Manhattan around the turn into the 19th century. Culinary anthropologist Paul R. Mullins cites an 1803 English cookbook as the first of its kind to mention doughnuts (in an appendix of “American” recipes) in his book Glazed America: A History of the Doughnut.

But Mullins' own work gives rise to a dispute over the doughnut's true origin.  He cites a 1669 Dutch recipe for "olie-koecken" as a possible evolutionary link between pastries of the 17th century and the American favorite that would eventually give soldiers from the United States the name "doughboys" during World War I (thanks to American doughnut girls who delivered sweet morsels of relief).

Without dispute, some genius had the idea of taking bits of dough and frying them in hot oil and serving them up with sugar or a sugar glaze - and they took off like hotcakes - or doughnuts.  Most folks agree that the modern American doughnut started that way. But surely someone else made that connection beforehand.  After all, hot oil and pastry go ways back.

In fact, there are several distinctive fried dough products present throughout the Middle Ages in cultures spanning Europe and Asia.  The Germans were packing jam into pastry as early as the 15th century and calling it a Gefüllte Krapfen (renamed the Berliner a few centuries later), a filling of jam between two yeast rolls deep fried in lard that came to be known as the sufganiyah, as recorded in the Kuchenmeisterei (Mastery of the Kitchen) published in 1485. Mind you, this delicacy was more likely to be stuffed with fish or beef, but what the heck, it's close.

The Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook of the 13th Century gives us a number of fried pastries, including Shabât, a layered dough interspersed with butter and fried in duck fat.  You may now remove the drool from your keyboard.  I've had arguments with others over another dish from that very chapter, Sanbûsak, which is also a pastry fried in fat - but from what I understand, you roll the dough out very flat, put in a filling and then fry it, making it a closer approximation to today's fried pies. There goes the drool again.

Arab cooks would take bits of dough, fry them and then soak them in a sugar syrup. In the Kitabh al-Tabikh, one of two Arab cookbooks from the 8th-10th centuries, several recipes could be pointed at as predecessors to the doughnut.  For instance, there was zulaabiyyah, a fritter made by pouring batter into hot oil (Charles Perry has a lovely article on the book here).  From a second book with a very similar name, also known by Perry's title A Baghdad Cookery Book, we get Aqras Mukarrara with its discs of hot oil fried golden pastry (Check out this version in Fearless Kitchen).

Even the Romans had their own version - a sweetened sticky bun that was easy to carry.  These, when piled up at marriage festivities, would go on to become the pre-medieval predecessor to the modern wedding cake, and brides and grooms would be compelled to see if they could kiss over the tops of these tasty towers.  As in all things of that time, a taller tower meant more favorable fertility possibilities.

Still, even with this sort of documentation about the mighty doughnut, where does bread pudding come in?  That, my friends, can be traced back to the French, through the art of pain perdu, or lost bread.  Two breakfast-related culinary traditions come from this "lost bread."

In many places, the combination of stale bread, sour milk and old eggs resulted in a dish of what eventually came to be known as French toast.  In others, the three ingredients would be slopped together, mashed a bit, and thrown in a pan to slide into a cooling oven after the rest of the meal was cooked.  This combination was first recorded in the very first extant cookbook we know of today, that of the Roman dude Apicius, who recorded this recipe "Aliter dulcia" (another sweet): Break slice fine white bread, crust removed, into rather large pieces which soak in milk and beaten eggs fry in oil, cover with honey and serve. Sounds like French toast to me.

There are a lot of different versions that could be considered the forerunners of bread pudding. There's Om Ami, an Egyptian dish of phyllo dough, milk, eggs, honey and pistachios.  There's also Shahi tukra, a Mughlai dish (yes, relevant to my current interests) that translates as Royal Morsel and which contains bread fried in ghee then soaked in rosewater and cream.  A lack of perfected recipes in European menus, however, more indicates that the dish was lowly, an opportunity to utilize scraps or sops, and not until the emergence of English whitepot in the 17th century did the pudding start getting its just due.

When sugar was added, and when the mess was covered with rum sauce when pulled out and served, this became the bread pudding best known for its New Orleans connections. But sugar was not a necessary ingredient, and thrifty bakers using whatever was on-hand managed to scrape up savory bread puddings of ham, bacon, beef, cheese, vegetables or whatever was available to create hearty, gut-filling meals.

Bread pudding came to me twice in my life.  When I was a young girl, I watched a perfectly good loaf of white bread be ruined with a thorough soaking in milk at my paternal grandmother's home - an action that made me cringe knowing how lovely it would have been as a slice of French toast.  The milk emulsion with its few beaten eggs was rendered brown and speckledy with additions of cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla and brown sugar, and the slice of bread were allowed to dissolve helplessly before the smooth resultant batter was poured into a pan.  The resulting eggy bricks were heavy and sad, a homogenized sign of surrender that could not be resurrected by a sweet buttery icing (alcohol was frowned upon by that side of the family).

I couldn't bear the thought of bread pudding for years afterwards.  But in 2000, I traveled to New Orleans for a respite and made my first venture to the New Orleans School of Cooking.  There, Chef Michael and Big Kevin and Little Kevin all passed through that day while I learned many different dishes of the area, including bread pudding.

And I immediately got it - old eggs, stale bread and spoiled milk - and the magic they could render. So I took it home with me, and rendered bread pudding for breakfast that following February at Candlelight Camp.  My concoction, which included pineapple and cherries, was a hit, and from then on I tried to fit a bread pudding into any feasty thing I did -- from apple pie bread pudding at Fall Crown List 2002 to ham and cheese bread pudding at Barbearian Brawl in 2005 to black-and-white bread puddings at Barbearian Brawl 2013 and pineapple upside down bread puddings for Christmas 2015.

And along the way, I learned something else.  You could make a lot of bread pudding with any bread, but for sweet bread puddings, doughnuts were an awesome choice.  I made more of these over the years and shared the information with my friends.  Some of those friends are chefs.  I'm not saying I created the doughnut bread pudding craze, but I certainly fed it.

So doughnuts have been around for centuries, and lost bread for millenia.  Is it really so crazy to think that the two could have come together?

The short of it is, doughnut bread pudding is here to stay.  Every event where I'm responsible for breakfast, it comes out.  Every event that happens at, I have to explain it.  So yeah, there are some historical components.  But it's more to take advantage of cheap ingredients - even cheaper when you learn that my local Kroger bakery gal just gives me a box when she sees me coming and lets me fill it with as many day-olds as I can shove in.  Yeah, always get to be friends with the folks at your local grocery store.

For those who have asked, here's a quick version of the recipe, scaled down to family sized. Remember, you do not have to be exact. And it does not matter if your doughnuts are glazed, cake, old-fashioned or even filled - they'll work.

Doughnut Bread Pudding
1 dozen doughnuts (stale is better)
1 pint milk (or 1 1/2 cup heavy cream, 3 personal containers of yogurt or similar dairy equivalent)
3 eggs
1/2 cup sugar

Tear doughnuts into pieces.  In a measuring pitcher, beat eggs and mix in dairy component and sugar. Place doughnut pieces into greased 13x9 pan, pour egg mixture over and mush lightly with fingers. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes or until knife inserted in center comes out clean.

Variations:
Chocolate raspberry - Make recipe with chocolate glazed and raspberry filled doughnuts.
Pineapple upside down - In Bundt pan, arrange one can's worth of pineapple rings.  Place maraschino cherries inside the rings.  Replace half of milk with reserve pineapple liquid.
Apple pie - In Bundt can, arrange half of bread-egg mixture.  Spoon in one can of apple pie filling. Add in the rest of the bread-egg mixture.  Note - knife will not come out of pudding clean.
Croque Monsier - Add 1 teaspoon black pepper, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, six ounces Gruyere and six ounces Parmesan to the mixture.  Put down half the mixture into the pan, top with thin sliced ham, add the rest.  Bake.  Serve with mustard or jam.