We recently went on a holiday entilted ‘The splendours of Corsica’.

Le pastizzu is a dessert, a sort of meeting between an English bread and butter pudding and the French crème caramel. Corsican restaurants don’t always excel in the dessert department so, when we were offered this, we ordered it, ate it and asked for the recipe. They printed it off the internet for us and were delighted with our interest! Here is the link https://cuisine.journaldesfemmes.fr/recette/1017831-le-pastizzu-le-dessert-corse-a-base-de-pain-rassis. There are plenty of other pastizzu recipes on the net but they all have one thing in common: they look nothing like the version we produced, see above!!

So here is a rough translation of the recipe which we made, with some hints based on our own experiences.

Le Pastizzu: the Corsican dessert based on stale bread

If stale French bread could generate renewable energy, the French would be 100% carbon free tomorrow. They are way ahead of the rest of us anyway because of their reliance on nuclear electricity generation, but what I meant was that stale bread is a very common by-product of the Francophone kitchen, so this slightly unappetising title may be a sort of culinary recycling advertisement. Even so, I’m glad the Brits don’t refer to one of our classic traditions as ‘bread and butter pudding made with stale bread’.

Ingredients:

350 ml of milk

A vanilla pod

50 g butter

4 eggs

200 g crème fraîche

Zest of 1 lemon

150 g of stale French bread, sliced

100 g sugar

For the caramel:

120g sugar

10 ml water (note: the recipe we were given - see link above - asks for 10 g of water but others suggest 10 mls of the stuff. We strongly recommend the latter!)

Method

Please note that this is not a direct translation of the recipe we were given but our adaptation to suit the sort of equipment found in a British kitchen with a few extra instructions reflecting our own experiences.

1 Gently heat the milk, crème fraîche, vanilla pod, butter and lemon zest until it comes to the boil. Turn off the heat and leave to infuse for 3 to 4 minutes. Strain the mix into a cake or flan tin and add the bread in a layer. Make sure the cake tin doesn’t have a loose bottom as it will probably leak all over your kitchen surfaces.

2 Meanwhile make the caramel by heating the sugar and water until it becomes a lovely amber colour. Allow to cool.

3 Blanch the eggs with the sugar: we presume this means beat the eggs and sugar over a gentle heat for two to three minutes until pale and foamy. Pour over the bread mix. We would then suggest leaving the dish for a while to allow the egg mix to soak into the bread.

4 Re-heat the carmel until it is liquid again and pour over the bread and egg mix.

5 Place the cake/flan tin in a bain Marie/baking dish full of hot water and bake in an oven at 180 degrees for 55 minutes until golden brown.

Enjoy!