Comment on This savory bread pudding shines with bacon and leeks

A handful of years ago, one of you readers paid this column a great compliment by saying that the recipes here call for ingredients that “normal” people have in their kitchens. My kitchen is probably a “normal” Yankee kitchen with a few specialty ingredients thrown in so I can make the occasional Indian or Thai dish. So when I read a recipe for Mushroom Bread Pudding from Ina Garten, the cookbook author and television cook known as the Barefoot Contessa, my substitutions popped up automatically for her various sophisticated ingredients: bacon for pancetta, cheddar for Gruyere, sturdy white bread for rustic loaf, bouillon for homemade chicken broth, plain old white mushrooms for cremini.