16 hours ago
If we have time to stream Netflix piffle, we have time to steam a pudding
In skittish mood during his tour of the Hebrides, Samuel Johnson devised a satirical meditation on a pudding in the style of a popular volume of religious homilies: 'Let us seriously reflect what a pudding is composed of.'
The ingredients, he mused, are elemental: 'flour, that… once drank the dews of the morning; milk, pressed from the swelling udder by the gentle hand of the beauteous milk-maid… an egg, that miracle of nature'. And so on.
Satire aside, puddings have been for centuries the foundation and ornament of our national culinary heritage. Even the French, swift to belittle the cuisine of these islands, are keen on them. 'Ah, what an excellent thing is an English pudding!' wrote François Maximilien Misson, visiting England in the 1690s.
Several centuries later, Simon Hopkinson recalled with satisfaction an occasion when the Michelin rosette-laden chef Alain Ducasse dined at Bibendum, where he was so taken with Hopkinson's steamed ginger sponge pudding that he asked for the recipe. (A homely affair of breadcrumbs, flour, stem ginger, treacle and egg, the method is given in Hopkinson's recipe book, The Good Cook.)
But have our historic puddings become an endangered species? A poll by YouGov for English Heritage finds melancholy evidence of popular decline, at least where homemade puddings (defined by the survey as a cooked sweet course, including pies and crumbles) are concerned. Two thirds of households in England, Scotland and Wales make a pudding once a month or less, while the remaining third never make one at all.
By way of encouraging us to rediscover our traditional confections, English Heritage is offering a couple of pudding-inspired ice-cream flavours at its sites: sticky toffee, and apple crumble and custard. Ice cream now seems in danger of joining pizza toppings as a repository for random and essentially ill-advised flavour combinations: a summer pudding ice cream might have proved more appetising.
Jane Grigson observed in her book English Food that puddings were 'some of the first victims of mass catering and manufacture'. Making them takes time (Hopkinson's ginger sponge needs to be steamed for two hours – about as long as it takes to watch My Oxford Year, the preposterous rom-com currently streaming on Netflix.) And time is the essential ingredient that many of us now lack.
But there is also the question of the effort-to-enjoyment ratio. Hopkinson's ginger sponge is delectable, but some of the sturdier puddings belong to a less sedentary era. In Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, spotted dog, figgy dowdy and drowned baby are popular delicacies of Captain Jack Aubrey's wardroom. But Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, a recipe-book based on the food described in the novels, suggests that they might lie heavy on the insides of anyone not in the habit of running up the ratlines.
The original purpose of many puddings, to provide as many calories as possible, as cheaply as possible, has now been overtaken by fast food. And the generations are dwindling for whom a steamed pud with custard was the nostalgic equivalent of Proust's madeleine.
So perhaps the proper place for most puddings is a dignified retirement to volumes such as the forthcoming English Heritage Baking Book – to be revived, occasionally, by those of us with a yearning for a suet-based culinary hug with custard on top, and a two-hour film to watch.
