Corn Bread Pudding

I opened my fridge today, and found myself staring at half a pan full of 3-day old cornbread, which was starting to resemble a large, square hockey puck. I'd used half a bag of cornmeal to get to this point, so I wasn't about to throw it out. Remembering that bread pudding recipes usually call for "day old bread," I decided to try a new twist on an old favorite.

The cornbread I started with was from the "Southern style cornbread" recipe in the latest edition of Joy of Cooking. For those who are unfamiliar with the technicalities of cornbread (Technicalities? Cornbread? Yes, believe it or not...) Southern cornbread is made with stone ground corn meal, buttermilk, a dab of bacon grease and some salt. Oh, and baking powder for "leavening" -- as if there were any hope of making something this thick and heavy rise. No sugar, no white flour. It tasted EXACTLY like cornmeal (shocking, isn't it!) and was very dry. I attribute this to my brilliant decision to use powdered buttermilk and water instead of the real thing. I'll have to try again later with an actual dairy product.

So, my already-dry cornbread had grown increasingly so over the past few days, and the time finally came to send it on to greener pastures. I modified a recipe for bread pudding and one for "Indian pudding" and came up with the following. It is light and fluffy at the bottom, almost like a custard, with chunks of dense cornbread browned at the top. If you use more cornbread or cornmeal than called for in the recipe, you will end up with a heavier dessert.

Because I used stone ground cornmeal throughout, the cornbread bits are chewy and more "rustic" in texture, but if you used a finely-ground cornmeal you could achieve a more velvety effect. By the way, sorry for the rather blurry pic. I brought this into work and had to document it with a digital point and shoot that's approximately older than I am...


Update: Somehow, in the course of my numerous edits and struggle to get the photo up, I deleted the recipe. Naturally, I don't have it written down anywhere, so I'll have to wait until next time...