Pain d’chien with vergeoise, raisins and rum
Pain d’chien is a northern French thrift pudding built to use stale bread, especially in Nord–Pas-de-Calais. Its texture is not that of British bread-and-butter pudding, where intact buttered slices remain visible. Here the bread is soaked until fully saturated and broken down into a dense, unified mixture before baking.
The sweetening comes from vergeoise, the soft brown beet sugar closely associated with northern French baking. Raisins and dark rum add the familiar fruit-and-spirit note in this household preparation. The raisins, bread and milk soak together for a full hour, so the fruit softens while the bread absorbs the sweetened liquid. The eggs are mixed through only after the soak, helping the pudding set without turning it into a light cake.
Bake the loaf at 180 °C until the centre reaches at least 71 °C and is set rather than wet. That temperature is a food-safety control for the egg-rich centre, not merely a texture cue. The loaf then needs a long cooling period because its dense crumb slices much more cleanly once fully cooled. Rum is not guaranteed to disappear during baking, so the finished pudding should not be presented as alcohol-free.
