We eat toast as part of our weekend breakfasts quite often. Nobody has time for toasting anything on weekdays, so breakfast then is either cereal or a simple sandwich.

The end slices are usually no good for toasting. They’re too thin, and the crust makes them curve when heated, so they toast unevenly. The edges are too dark while the middle is not crispy enough. I’m too thrifty to throw them away, though – one doesn’t throw away perfectly edible food just because it’s inconvenient in shape. Instead there’s a bag in the freezer where we dump all the end slices. (Or some of us just leave them in the original bread bag and shove it to one side in the bread drawer in the freezer, and then weeks later I wonder what’s with all the nearly-empty bags, and then I end up consolidating four bags of end slices into one.)

I’ve used the end slices for croutons in the past and used them for a deconstructed French onion soup, and for salads. Today I wanted to make bread pudding, which I haven’t eaten since I was a child. It was a thing in Estonia (saiavorm) but it’s virtually unknown in Sweden. I don’t think they even have a word for it.

There was no shortage of hits when I googled for recipes for saiavorm, but making use of them was harder. There was no agreement whatsoever when it came to proportions. When rescaled to about 400 g bread, one had 3 decilitres of sugar (or something like that, because the recipe was based on “half a loaf of sai” of unspecified size) while another had 2 to 3 tablespoons. One had one egg per one dl of milk; another had twice as much eggs as milk; a third had the opposite.

In the end I gave up on the recipes and just winged it. The end result both looked and tasted good, but was a bit too dry. Less bread next time, for the same amount of eggs, milk and apples. (Less bread, rather than more of the rest, because half of what we had would have been enough.)

My childhood version definitely had raisins, but I think it may have been without apples.