Forget ‘serendipity’, that frequent poll-topper; ‘pudding’ is one of my most favourite words, along with ale, beef and pie.
How central to our culture is the pudding! We have Pudding Lane, the seat of the Great Fire of London, although it sounds like the kind of mildly mocking nickname prevalent in my schooldays. Our ‘Lane’, the Cornish chemistry master with an accent as thick as clotted cream, we actually called ‘Bronco’, which surely dates me. A television cowboy, and also a particularly unforgiving brand of toilet paper, if you need to know.
Anyway, Dickens, a great chronicler of dinners in general, is full of puddings, many of them in The Pickwick Papers I think; Bakewell tart as I’m sure you know is properly ‘Bakewell Pudding’ and Burns, in his Ode to the Haggis, famously apostrophises the delicacy as ‘Great Chieftain of the Pudding Race’. And I bet somewhere or other there is a pudding race, like cheese rolling in Gloucestershire, or carrying burning tar barrels along the high street of a Devon village. Such are our traditional national eccentricities, and long may they survive.
Do you remember that childhood saying, “you’d laugh to see a pudding roll”? Its genius was that it was guaranteed to elicit exactly that response, and you may have smiled at it again just now. Quite why the idea is so amusing I don’t know, but it was, and still is if you’ve no other current diversion. The syntactical pedant in me can’t resist observing that logically it should be “you’d laugh at the sight of a rolling pudding”, but that lacks the iambic trot, and anyway, we really should keep him in his box at this time of year, shouldn’t we?
Well, I too like to be full of puddings when I can, at least a pudding. Christmas pudding I think is a ‘grown up’ taste. Is it the density, or perhaps just the booze? As children we found it a bit heavy going, and I think it was only the chance of discovering the sixpence secreted somewhere in its dark heart that kept us at it. The cream, or custard, whichever it may have been, was a necessary counterbalance, and I was always up for custard.
Years later, living in what was known as short life housing, I once decided to make some Christmas puddings in January. No, that wasn’t me being late as usual, but an uncharacteristic instance of foresight. Before I go on, I ought to explain that these were council houses fallen into such a state that they were no longer suitable for letting. Michael Hesletine was ‘rate-capping’ local authorities up and down the land, so they didn’t have enough funds to repair their housing stock. This was of course to prepare the way for the great sell-off of public assets, but that’s another story. “Ooh, a little bit of politics”, as Ben Elton used to say. But stay with me, the pudding’s coming, as my wife tells me she used to say as a child. I mention all this for context: my puddings counted as interior decor in an otherwise gloomy domestic interior.
An end now to this digression; this isn’t Tristram Shandy. Oh, there’s the booze again . . . anyway, I made the mixture, which contained enough brandy to sink Nelson’s navy, and bound it up in about twenty muslin balls, each containing an old sixpence; at least I think so, but you must forgive me because this was all over forty years ago and, like the alcohol, the finer details have evaporated. I then knotted them at the top, and hung them on a string rigged up along the kitchen wall just below the ceiling. They looked like those coin containers that used to zoom around department stores on a kind of zipwire, long before the advent of paytech. And there my puddings stayed for the rest of the year, gathering dust like vintage clarets in a wine cellar.
They also resembled some sort of small arms ammunition, or hand grenades. My father always used to say that Auntie Muriel’s sausage rolls were like Mills bombs, clearly not a compliment but very much of his time. Recently, sausage rolls have been established as a new Christmas tradition, and I’d like to think my puddings would have topped the charts if ever they’d been presented to John Torode or Prue Leith (can’t say Gregg Wallace just now). In retrospect though, presentation wasn’t their Rocco Forte; unwrapping them brought to mind Howard Carter peeling back the bandages around Tutankhamun’s mummified head. Well, I bet that’s given you an appetite!
As I had more puddings than I needed for my own consumption, I was able to give some as presents. The grand culmination of course was when they were set alight as they were brought to the table. How many other dishes are served ‘flambe’? I mean, with actual flames? Echoes of Bob Newhart here: ‘You set fire to it, Wal?’ This year’s challenge is to make a pudding to satisfy my vegan nephew. Now living in Romania, he’s bringing his Transylvanian girlfriend, and lord only knows what her puddings contain. Doubtless I shall find out, but perhaps I should take some black pudding along just in case. Don’t want anyone feeling homesick. One thing’s certain though, and that’s that I’m going to soak the Christmas pud in plenty of spirit and bring it in flaming.
I’ll close with a quote from a truly delightful book, Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England, truly the Moby Dick of its subject, comprehensive and encyclopaedic. In a lengthy chapter on pies and puddings she describes something called Gotham Pudding (Gotham here apparently being a ‘little country town outside Nottingham’, not where Batman and Robin come from. No, I’d never heard of it either). It begins with the following verse:
There were three wise men of Gotham
Who went to sea in a bowl.
Had the bowl been stronger,
My tale had been longer.
That seems like an excellent prompt for bringing an end to my own tale, and I wish a very Happy Christmas to you all!