Summer Pudding the aftermath

July 31st

I checked the summer pudding the morning after I made it by putting a plate on top of the bowl and turning it upside down, as suggested in the cookbook but nothing happened. Feeling slightly panicked I gave up and put it back in the fridge thinking ‘never mind, we will just eat it like trifle and spoon it out.’ I came back a bit later and tried again, leaving it upside down this time on the plate. When I looked a few seconds later it had come out like an avalanche, like a sodden handkerchief, not pert like Nigel Slater’s on line summer pudding. It tasted great though. I had achieved the elimination of sharpness by using raspberries and blackberries instead of blackcurrants and sponge fingers instead of bread. Although, on reflection, I think the bread helps it to stand up. Note made of that for future, also don’t put too much juice in.

When I spooned it out it felt like a bowl of nostalgia, my past in summer fruits. Raspberry red was starkly contrasted with the whiteness of crème fraiche. I tasted the mushy raspberry drenched sponge which melted on contact lifting out the sweet dark blackcurrants, which had been hiding in the sponge, rolling them into my mouth. No sharp surprise.

Summer Pudding

It was Sunday afternoon, after church and I had just had lunch. I opened up Grandma's 1951 edition of the Good Housekeeping Home Encyclopaedia and decided to make a summer pudding, using the recipe I think she would have followed. I thought about them both as I took the musty smelling book into my kitchen and laid it on the surface. Grandma seemed so far away from me but then she did die when I was young. She seemed very austere when I was younger. I remember her with blonde/white hair tied up on her head, she seemed tall to me, even seated in her chair. She use to say to me, “you’re the one, you're the one." It was a joke and yet I knew not to mess with her and kept my distance. Somehow Summer pudding seemed to suit her, I thought as I took 2lbs of fruit out of the fridge ready to stew with caster sugar and water. As the fruit, in this case blackberries and raspberries, went into the pan the smell reminded me straight away of summer in my own mother’s kitchen. Me in strappy t shirt watching my mother concentrating on cooking, the dark pink raspberries and blackcurrants simmering.

I need to add that summer pudding also use to bore me slightly as a kid because there was no bowl to lick out afterwards. The stewed fruit, though evocative of summer, was not enticing like my mother’s cake baking or her richer desserts. There was no butter cream involved.

I remember summer pudding had a sweetness about it; but then you would get hit with the sharpness of blackcurrants and need to retreat to cream to get yourself through the dish. My grandmother Elsie seemed to me to have a tartness about her like blackcurrants or redcurrants. She definitely wasn’t a treacle sponge pudding grannie. I do know that she was feisty, which kind of goes with this dish. My dad tells me that she wouldn’t be told what to do and had a very strong sense of right and wrong. So in my kitchen I stewed the fruit and took it off the ring and then lined a bowl with sponge fingers. I didn't want to use bread in the summer pudding. I wanted more sugar, more sweetness if I was going to make it. Separating out fruit and juice, I spooned the fruit on top of the boudoir biscuits and then put on another layer of biscuits and then fruit until I was at the top. I then put a blue denby plate on the top of the summer pudding and weighed it down with 5 cartons of Waitrose apple juice and stuck it in the fridge over night. I was worried, as usual, that it was not up to scratch but intrigued to see how it would turn out. Funny how the family script that all must be perfect, kicked in when making this dish.

Revisiting the dishes my grandparents have made is like exercising the ghosts within me that have got trapped in my make up. The ones that tell me I must be perfect at everything. So if my summer pudding looks like a blob on a plate tomorrow I will try really hard not to care, I thought.

I finished the pudding and looked around me my kitchen looked like a raspberry blood bath. I still have a red stain on the bread board.

Coffee Rum Gateau

I need to introduce myself as Coffee rum gateau. I am named after a dessert my mother use to make in the 70’s, which you can see in this faded 70’s picture from my mother’s cookbook. I remember the cake so well that it seems part of the landscape of my childhood. When I started to think about it again, some 20 or so years later, looking back in my mother’s cookbook I found it didn’t look like I remember. That’s because my mother had altered the recipe and shaped it into her own. First of all she called it gateau, rather than cake, because this was the seventies, the height of the dinner party and my mother wanted to impress, which she did with this cake. Also, rather than those rather poor looking walnuts on top of the gateau, which you see in the picture, my mother got a Cadbury’s flake, I still remember the fantastic seventies flake wrapper, and shred it all over the top of the coffee rum gateau, which would render me speechless with excitement and expectation about when I would get my choppers around a piece of it. When she used to make this cake I must have been around 7-8 years old. I would be drawn into the kitchen by the smell of my mums baking. I seem to remember I was always at her right hand side, not blocking the light coming in from the kitchen window, just watching, taking it all in, from the mixing together of the raw ingredients through to the cooking of the cake in the oven and the final stage of decoration prior to the doorbell ringing and friends of my parents coming round for dinner. If a cake like this formed a big part of my growing up that must mean there is some comfort in it for me. I guess this is true. It is also true because cooking formed a large part of my family life as I grew up and still does for my parents. The strange thing is that as I have started to write about my family and cooking I have started to cook myself. For years all cooking utensils have lain unused in my kitchen, waiting for the moment when I set them to use and now I have started cooking, I can’t stop. It’s like all those years I thought I was no good at baking I have realised that wasn’t true and I can do it. There has been an explosion in my kitchen and cakes and brownies and cookies are all floating down onto my kitchen work surfaces. I will fill you in with what I have been cooking as the days go by. First let me scan on the recipe for coffee rum gateau, which I will make for myself, for the first time over the next few weeks. I don’t think I will make it this week because the stomach needs a rest but you never know, I will keep you posted. This week I will be making summer pudding, one of the dishes my Grandma use to make.