Banana Bread Pudding

Method

Tips

• Food historians by and large acknowledge the early development of bread pudding to frugal cooks who didn't want to waste stale bread and as a result it was common practice to use stale or hard breads in a variety of different ways including edible serving containers like medieval sops, focaccia, stuffing or forcemeat, special dishes, like French toast and thickeners or more commonly known today as puddings.
  Bread pudding recipes during the 19th century were often published in recipe books under the heading "Invalid cookery”. The bread was soaked in milk or water, then sugar, butter, fruit, and or spices were added, and then it was baked, sometimes the mixture was housed in a “sop”, a hollowed out loaf of bread. Whereas modern bread pudding is made by pouring custard and other flavouring’s over cubed bread and then baking it.
  The addition of some fat, if at all possible in the form of butter, and something like currants is all that is needed to move this frugal dish into the category of treats, and this is what has made certain its survival in the cook’s repertoire, even on cooks who never have stale bread on their hands.
  Bread pudding is a dessert popular in British cuisine, Puerto Rican cuisine, Mexican cuisine, Argentina, Louisiana Creole, and that of the Southern United States, as well as Belgian and French cuisine.
  The French refer to it by the English name "pudding" without the word "bread" and the Belgians call it Bodding or broodpudding, which literally translates as bread pudding. In Spanish, it is also referred to as "Capirotada”, "Migas" and "Pudín de Pan". It is made using stale bread, suet, egg, sugar or golden syrup, spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, mace or vanilla, and dried fruit.