Sunday, 29 July 2007

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.

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