A rhapsody on puddings that would not have disgraced Belshazzar's chef
PAUL JOHNSON
Last month I enjoyed a remarkable pudding served at the princely dinner that Lord and Lady Carrington gave in the Banqueting House to mark their diamond wedding. It consisted of two glasses, one containing a perfect, piping-hot, chocolate soufflé, the other a delectably chilled raspberry ice. The miracle of timing and organisation required to serve this treat to hundreds of people might have defeated the great Belsha77ar himself.
I confess that I love a good, rich, recherché pudding. I like simple ones, too. Since the poignant depression that I suffered last year restored to me a youthful figure, I have watched my diet closely in order to keep it. But I will not sacrifice my puds. Rather, I drop the hors d'oeuvre, or even the main course, believing that two are enough for any civilised feeder. I punctuate my life by successive discoveries of puddings. Aged four, in the infants' class at my convent school, I was for the first time conscious of eating a named pudding, 'floating islands'. Later, I had the convent's version of spotted dick, a dish called 'Reverend Mother's leg' by the bolder gym-slipped girls. Aged eight, I enjoyed my first posh restaurant pudding, an ice meringue so delicious that I could scarcely believe my senses. At boarding school, for the choir's annual treat, I had my first peche Melba. This concoction of peach, vanilla ice and raspberry purée, designed by Escoffier in 1894 for the Australian coloratura Nellie Mitchell from Melbourne (hence the Melba) in return for two tickets for Lohengrin, I now regard as overrated, to put it mildly, but it was sumptuous fare for me then.
My youth in Paris I associate with that mouth-watering pudding, the dip/ornate, a lightsome mixture of foamy sponge and crystallised fruits and nuts, covered in a creamy French custard, so different from the tasteless English variety that was disgusting even before the wartime Age of the Dried Egg. This pud was invented by Talleyrand and his chef (with whom he spent an hour in consultation every day) and in my Paris days was made to perfection in the old Beaux-Arts restaurant just opposite the e'cole. I used to reckon that if you favoured a young lady with a dozen fines belons, an escalope Liegeoise and a dip/ornate, moistened by a sensible bottle of Chambertin, she was yours till breakfast. But the chef at the restaurant never would give me the recipe.
Maturity brought me, among other things, the summer pudding. In my day this superb invention was not known in the north of Eng land, summer soft fruits being invariably stewed into tastelessness, with never quite enough sugar to obviate that painful spasm of the jaw when you took your first sour mouthful. As a result, I put blackberries way down on my scale of pleasures, though I award high marks for a bilberry tart, best of all fruit tarts, I think, and one pud which is well made in Lancashire and even in the West Riding. For the same reason I am mightily suspicious of rhubarb in any form, and would not voluntarily eat Nigella Lawson's favourite pudding, the pig's bum, though I would certainly set to bravely if the fragrant creator served it to me with her own fair hands. Her mother Vanessa, who was even more beautiful and the perfect image of the limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti in the Berlin Museum, once dished up the best creme brill& I have ever tasted, though whether she cooked it herself I do not know — the Lawsons lived grandly in those days and, I think, had a cook or even a chef.
When I was a boy I would probably, if asked to name my favourite pudding, have replied 'strawberries and cream', and I still rate the dish highly. It was invented by Cardinal Wolsey and first served at his new palace of Hampton Court. No one before him had thought of the obvious trick of heaping this noble fruit with fresh cream and pyramids of white sugar. What we do not know is whether Wolsey's strawberries were the big juicy variety we eat today, which first became common quite late in the 18th century, or whether they were what we would call wild strawberries. We grow these in Somerset — tiny, delectable things with a pure strawberry taste, not the faintly metallic flavour that spoils Frenchfraises du bois for me: those are best served in tarts. Even better than British wild strawberries, but rare, are the raspberries which grow in hedges in the far north of Scotland, in late July or even August. When I rented a cottage near the River Beauly in Inverness-shire, while I was writing my History of Christianity, I used to walk up the glen in the early morning and pick a cupful for breakfast.
Puddings go back a long way in English history. It was Richard II — a finicky man, the first to use a pocket handkerchief, a proper linen napkin and a two-pronged fork, as well as a knife — who made puddings the thing. But he did not call them that: too Anglo-Saxon and plebeian, I suppose (he was the last English king to speak perfect French). His The Forme of Cary, the first court cookery book to be produced in Eng land (it contains 196 recipes), insists that a proper meal has to have a soup course, a main one and then a series of sotiltees. They do not strike me as being particularly subtle, though great attention was paid to shape and colour. A typical one was a moree, a dish of mulberries stewed in honey (shades of 1930s Lancashire!) and most were fairly obvious combinations of fruits and wines. The only pudding of this type that Richard II would recognise today is the zabaglione, admittedly a splendid way to end a meal, especially if robustly prepared by my friend Carla.
Jane Austen, too, seems to have been fond of mulberries, though it may be that she preferred to eat them fresh off the branch like Mrs Jennings in Sense and Sensibility, who praised Delaford to the skies:
Exactly what I call a nice, old-fashioned place, full of comforts and conveniences, quite shut in with great garden walls that are covered with the best fruit trees in the country. And such a mulberry tree in one corner! Lord, how Charlotte and I did stuff the only time we were there!
Puddings make frequent appearances on Austen's pages, but none appeals strongly to me: gooseberry tart (ouch!), gingerbread, suet and rice puddings, apple dumplings, apricot tart (another snare unless baked in the French way) — a pedestrian list.
To these suetty duds I would add baclavas and jalousies, rum babas and banana fritters, all sweet-and-sticky heavy things, together with clubman's fifth-form puds such as treacle tart. Jane Austen's fare includes a syllabub, and that is acceptable, if well and lightly made. But on the whole an ice of some kind is most likely to succeed with me. I have sat next to beautiful women at dinner and seen them turn away an ice pudding, in which case I eat it myself as well as my own. It all depends on the home skills with which it is made. There is no pudding, no dish almost, which varies so much from triumphant to atrocious. I well remember certain masterpieces, especially a brownbread ice, which a charming lady used to bring up from Herefordshire for home delivery. Alas, she and the brown-bread ices are no more. Good cooks invent their own. The other day! dined at the home of Tamasin Day Lewis, the Daily Telegraph expert, and was served the best ice I have ever eaten, made of burnt orange according to a most complex and esoteric recipe. I don't know what Richard II would have made of it, but I had three helpings — unheard of!
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