Bread, cheese and onion bake

Most of my friends will tell you that I love cheese. A ploughman's lunch done right is a wonderful thing. But sometimes, you want something hot. Something a bit more crafted. Think of this as a cooked version of a ploughman's lunch. Or a savoury bread-and-butter pudding, if you prefer.

As this dish is really all about the bread and cheese, I urge you to use decent versions of both. Slightly stale bread is no problem at all - indeed it helps the dish to keep some texture, even after a nice hot bath of eggs and milk.I have even used leftover bagels (slice them top to bottom, so you get strips), which worked fine. But don't use anything too soft and pappy. I've used factory sliced bread before, and the results weren't as good.

The cheese can be almost anything, but the more flavoursome the better. If you use a mild cheddar you'll get a bland dish. And although I don't always want to "waste" a particularly expensive cheese by cooking with it, as the cheese is simply melted on top I think you will still be able to appreciate something interesting here.

Ingredients

Serves 4

1 pint milk
2 bay leaves, fresh if possible
2 cloves
1 medium good quality white loaf (preferably slightly stale) or about four to six rolls, depending on size
6 eggs
6oz/ 170g full-flavoured hard cheese (farmhouse Cheddar, Gruyere, or other farmhouse cheese - I've used Haytor from Curworthy cheeses in Devon with great success)
6 onions
A small knob of butter, plus more for buttering the bread if you wish.

Method

Preheat the oven to gas mark 5/ 190C/ 375F.

Heat the milk gently with the bay leaves and cloves and keep just below simmering point while you slice the bread and the cheese. Aim for bread slices about 1.25cm/ 1/2 in thick. You can butter the bread if you want - I personally don't bother. The butter will make it a tiny bit more moist and rich, but obviously less healthy.

After five to ten minutes, remove the milk from the heat and allow to cool a bit before you remove the cloves and bay leaves, and add the beaten eggs (if you add them to the milk when it's too hot, you'll have scrambled eggs).

Slice the onions thinly and put in a large frying pan with the knob of butter over a medium heat. Fry, stirring now and then, for about 15 minutes until they are wilted down and browned - turn the heat down if they start to burn.

Arrange some of your bread in the bottom of your oven dish in a single layer, with as few gaps as possible (you might need to cut some of the slices to fit). Then pour over about a third of the egg and milk mixture, aiming to soak all the bread. Add some of the onion - half of it or all of it, depending on whether you think you've got enough bread left for one more layer or two. If you've used half the bread already, put all the onions in now, then top with the rest of the bread and all the rest of the egg mixture. If you've got enough bread for a third layer, keep some of the onions back and repeat the process. Press the bread down a bit if the top is sticking up above the level of the dish. Make sure that there are no dry bits of bread that haven't had any egg and milk on them.

Bake in the preheated oven for 15 minutes, then add all the sliced cheese to cover the top (feel free to add a bit of extra cheese if the top isn't covered). Bake for a further 10-15 minutes or until the cheese is melted and the pudding is piping hot and set in the middle.