Cheese Pudding

So here it is, straight out of the oven, all golden and bubbling, Cheese Pudding, a staple of Maggie's family who was given the recipe by her mother-in-law, Janie, who apparently grew up on it herself. Very informal family too, no surnames this lot. Or maybe they just want to hide their identity from militant cows.

It's certainly a dairy-lovers dream.

Cheese pudding
5 -6 slices of bread and butter
2 eggs
a little mustard
salt pepper
1 pt/560ml milk
3-4oz/85-115g grated cheese - I used a mature cheddar
1 oz /45g breadcrumbs

Butter the bread and cut into halves diagonally, and lay in an oven-proof dish.
Beat the eggs with the milk and add the mustard and 3/4 of the grated cheese
Stir and pour the lot over the bread.
Top with the remaining cheese and the breadcrumbs

Bake in the oven for 40min-45mins at 170C/340F

And here it is on the plate - no looker, but there's an honesty to it that is appealing. Simple hearty fayre



So, what was it like?

It was a stodgy, cheesy mess and not unappealing either, exactly like a savoury bread and butter pudding, and I can see the appeal on a cold winter's night with an empty stomach, but, and I have to be honest here, it was way too stodgy.

This I believe - ok, I now know - was down to me as I used home-baked wholemeal bread which I probably cut too thickly (don't you just hate middleclass, namby-pamby values at times?). Because when I emailed Maggie to mention this she was horrified at the suggestion of using anything so wholesome, as it must be made with pre-cut white.

Apparently, the ideal garnish is a packet of Cheese and Onion Crisps (potato chips), so I guess the clues were there.

Now, on to the all important scores out of ten, a completely meaningless rating system devised by my more competitive side:

Taste: 7
Ease of making: 10
Family approval rating: 6

Which gives us a Recipe Orphan Rating (or a more snappy ROR) of 23

We're off!

Well Recipe Orphan has been up and running now for 2 days and already has 4 recipes.

Something the family lovingly named Crunch, which is like a granola. Hawaiian Sausages, which if I'm honest slightly scares me, but in for a penny as the saying goes. A lemon meringue pie with a biscuit pie crust, which doesn't scare me at all. And the simply named Cheese Pudding, which seems to be a sort of savoury bread and butter pudding and comes with a very strange garnish, and has the dubious honour of being the first dish I will be cooking.

Which just leaves me to say, thank you so very much for your interest and support so far.

Please feed the blog

Hi and welcome.

This site is an experiment and it needs you to make it happen. Otherwise it's going to just collect dust on some digital shelf of the blogshere.

The idea is simple.

As you can see from my biog, I'm lacking in family recipes and so want yours. I plan on cooking as many as possible and posting the results here. Letting you know what they were like, how much my family enjoyed them (or didn't), who they came from and to share with you whatever stories, pictures and memories that get sent with them.

I'm hoping recipes will come from all over the world covering all our cultures.

It's all about sharing and celebrating those personal, family recipes that have traditionally been handed down from generation to generation and are often the only real, tangible memory we have of long gone loved ones, which in some cases, we many never have met.

If no one sends me recipes the site dies. So, please feed the site. Please send any recipe you and your family hold dear to recipeOrphan[AT]yahoo[DOT]com