English Puddings: Sweet and Savoury by Mary Norwak is first and foremost a historical cookbook. If you are looking for Scottish or Welsh or Irish puddings, go somewhere else. You won’t find them here.
What you will find are well-researched English recipes with short histories and facts sprinkled into every crevice. The introduction, titled “The Story of Pudding”, tracks the various types of English puddings through fashions, fads, and their migration through the kitchens of social climbers and common cooks as far back as anyone kept records.
On first flipping through the pages I was struck by how many of the recipe names are positively picturesque. I found myself stringing them together into silly stories:
Boodle’s Orange Fool (p. 38) sneaks from the vestry with a Quire of Paper (p. 88), trips over a Toad in the Hole (p. 102) outside the church, causing a Bedfordshire Clanger (p. 110) that wakes the entire village.
And…
A Tipsy Squire (p. 46) invites Gooseberry Charlotte with Sweet Cicely (p. 54) to his rooms to show them his collection of Cumberland Nickies (p. 180), suggests a bit of a Whim Wham (p. 48), and is handed his Sussex Plum Duff (p. 119) by a respectable Buckinghamshire Bacon Badger (p. 112) keen to protect the ladies’ honor.
Other names, like Blancmange (p. 19), sound like something a child might fear is hiding under his bed. I would guess you’d find Audrey Slaughter’s Honeycomb Mould (p. 24) growing amongst stale gym clothes and sticky candy wrappers under a teenage boy’s bed. Later in life he’ll have nightmares about Suck Cream (p. 33) followed by Spotted Dick (p. 121).
It’s hard to remain serious when contemplating recipes with names like these. Still, you can’t review a cookbook without breaking some eggs, so I took it to the kitchen. One caveat: I am not British, nor did I have a British nanny, so I am not familiar with how any of these should turn out. The recipes seem clear and easy enough to accomplish for anyone moderately familiar with a kitchen.
“English Puddings” was first published in London in 1981. The author uses primarily British terms, but she has included several handy lists translating the British into American equivalents, and she usually provides both weights and measures for the recipes.
This isn’t entirely satisfactory, however. The American equivalent she lists for ‘Golden Syrup’ is ‘light corn syrup’, and having found a tin of Golden Syrup at my local high-end grocery store, I can attest that they are alike only in that they are both sweet and have a similar consistency. Golden Syrup is a divine invention, a taste buds epiphany, while corn syrup is merely anemic sweet stuff with no flavor to speak of. In fact, several of the things listed as unavailable in the US are easily available now. We have hazelnuts these days, as well as semolina, and demerara sugar. It would be nice if they updated the 2010 edition.
That said, of the 20-plus recipes I attempted, pretty much everything was straightforward to make and tasted delicious. The only one I’m not sure about was the Apple Hog, which I made because it is supposed to resemble this site’s mascot, the hedgehog. Mine didn’t. It wasn’t attractive in any way. Though it was edible, it had a strange consistency. I’m sure I did something wrong, but I have no idea what.
The Yorkshire Pudding made with the drippings from our Thanksgiving duck was revelatory. I always imagined Yorkshire Pudding would be very complicated, but it’s dead easy, and delicious hot from the oven or cold for breakfast the next day.
Boodle’s Orange Fool was fun, in part because I substituted blood oranges for regular ones and ended up with Boodle’s Pink Fool. Everyone at that party agreed it was delicious, and as testimony, I took home an empty dish.
There were entire sections of the cookbook my kitchen is not set up to handle, like steamed puddings, so I can’t report on those. However, I would say that as a tool for cooking, this is a very useful cookbook, as well as an interesting and well researched document.
That essentially ends this review, but as I’ve always loved it when food is mentioned in literature, and so many of these recipes I know about solely from the pages of beloved novels, I can’t help but leave you with a few selections that mention other recipes you can find in this cookbook.
The Turkish Delight scene in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe is more famous (though the recipe is not given here), but do you remember the feast the children enjoyed at Mr. and Mrs. Beaver’s house?
“…And when they had finished the fish Mrs. Beaver brought unexpectedly out of the oven a great and gloriously sticky marmalade roll, steaming hot, and at the same time moved the kettle onto the fire, so that when they finished the marmalade roll the tea was made and ready to be poured out. And when each person had got his (or her) cup of tea, each person shoved his (or her) stool so as to be able to lean against the wall, and gave a long sigh of contentment.”
Bertie Wooster was confused by a menu ordered up by the spirited Miss Wickham in P.G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves:
“Employ the rest of the morning, then, in buzzing to and fro collecting provender. The old King Wenceslas touch, Jeeves. You remember? Bring me fish and bring me fowl–’
‘Bring me flesh and bring me wine, sir.’
‘Just as you say. You know best. Oh, and roly-poly pudding, Jeeves.’
‘Sir?’
‘Roly-poly pudding with lots of jam on it. Miss Wickham specifically mentions this. Mysterious, what?’
‘Extremely, sir.’
Watching Marmaduke Scarlet cook, Maria from The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge relates:
“Then he went through one of the doors in the wall, through which Maria could see a cool stone-vaulted larder, and came back with a big blue bowl full of eggs and a blue jug of cream; and, mounting once more upon his stool, he proceeded to make a syllabub. Twelve eggs went into the making of the syllabub, a pint of cream, and cinnamon for flavouring. “
And last, but not least, Mrs. Cratchit’s famous Christmas Pudding. Mary Norwak quite rightly quotes the relevant passage from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol in the preface to the recipe:
“Mrs Cratchit left the room alone — too nervous to bear witness — to take the pudding up and bring it in.
Suppose it should not be done enough! Suppose it should break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the back-yard and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose — a supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid! All sorts of horrors were supposed.
Hullo! A great deal of steam. The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eatinghouse and a pastry-cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered — flushed, but smiling proudly — with the pudding like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of a quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.”
After reading that quote from Dickens, I don’t know how anyone can claim that English food is bland and boring! I’m looking forward to tackling the “Boiled and Steamed Puddings” section, if only to replicate Mrs. Cratchit’s success.
(Grub Street Cookery, 2008)
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