“Bread pudding was the first thing that I baked after I came out to my parents,” the fiction writer Bryan Washington says, standing at his oven. The dish, which he’d been making since childhood, in one form or another, was a vehicle for nostalgia and comfort. “The hope is that, within a few bites, the dessert will transport you to a place much warmer, more familiar, than where you began,” Washington writes, in a Kitchen Notes piece on his signature recipe.
In the video, he tears up a white-bread baguette that crunches as he rips it, and drops the bite-size pieces into a baking dish. “On my block, no one had any real money, but, for bread pudding, you didn’t need it. Everyone kept bread in his pantry. It didn’t need to be fresh—even better if it wasn’t. Stale bread sopped up more batter, giving the pudding a forgiving crunch,” Washington says. Using simple ingredients and equipment—for the pudding, Washington heats white-chocolate chips and cream in the microwave—a home cook can orchestrate what he calls “a minor symphony of sweetness.”
After Washington came out to his parents, and baked that comforting batch of bread pudding for himself, he made another. “One for my mother, scalding and soaked in coconut milk splashed with rum,” he writes. This time, when he pulls the baking dish out of the oven, the torn baguette has absorbed the recipe’s syrupy liquids, turning gooey inside and crisply golden on top—transformed inside and out. It’s a simple dish, but one that, as Washington puts it, “will change your whole fucking day.”
