venta

The weekend before last, I was seized with a sudden whim to have treacle pudding[*] to follow Sunday dinner. Although I'm sure I've been involved in pudding-making with the mother, I think I mostly did the fancy string-and-greaseproof-paper part at the end rather than actual cooking, so didn't have a favourite recipe.

The BBC is usually a good bet, so I took this recipe as a starting point. The executive summary is: put treacle in pudding bowl, top with 4/4/8 sponge mixture, do the fancy string-and-greaseproof-paper part (instructions in recipe), and steam for a couple of hours. Sorted.

Fortunately I realised (at the last moment) that I don't actually own a pudding bowl large enough to make a pudding for four persons. I have a 1-pint pudding bowl - I have two, in fact - but that would make a bijou puddingette for two.

I set off round the cookshops and fleshpots of Ealing. Several places would sell me a 2-pint pudding bowl... but all were the wrong shape. Shallow and wide, instead of tall and tapered. That's not what you want for a pudding - not only would the pudding be squat, I wasn't even sure whether a shallow layer of treacle would be properly absorbed.

Here, as an illustrative wossname, is a picture of the two 1-pint pudding bowls I own. Left, correct shape for pudding. Right, morally invalid shape useful only for mixing small quantities of things.



Eventually, I ran a correctly-shaped bowl to earth. It was cheap, and only had one obvious flaw: it was made of plastic, not ceramic. Would it work? The label said it was boilable (and freezable, and dishwasherable, and just about bombproof). I asked the man in the shop, and he asked another man in the shop, and he went and asked a third person.

Yes, it would work. And I could use the clip-on plastic lid, instead of the fancy string-and-greaseproof-paper arrangement. Slightly uneasy, I walked home and phoned the mother (who uses a stripey blue ceramic bowl, string and greaseproof). Yes, she said, you can use a plastic bowl with a clip-on lid. It'll be fine. I started to tell her about my bowl-shopping woe, but she chimed in with "but they're all the wrong shape these days".

I followed the BBC recipe, although I struggled a bit with the four tablespoons of treacle. A tablespoon is a stupid measure for treacle, as you can pretty much make as much or as little as you like stick to the spoon. Everyone should measure treacle by weight. Anyway, at three tablespoons I decided it was already getting silly and stopped. Other than that I followed the recipe to the letter. Incidentally, can anyone else sieve self-raising without covering the entire kitchen in a thin white skim of flour? Is it just me?

The sponge went in on top of the treacle, the lid went on... and panic. As well as modern bowls being shallow, modern pans are shallow. Did I have a pan tall enough to wear its lid after I'd put in the obligatory upturned saucer and the pudding bowl? Answer: yes. Just. But only because the pan lid is slightly curved. And the whole thing simmered away while the Sunday roast happened.

A note for the unwary: the saucer sort of stabilises the bowl, and makes sure it doesn't bob around or tip over due to over-enthusiastic boiling (or burn onto the bottom of the pan). Make sure you remove the pan from the heat a while before you extract the pudding, or be prepared for a build-up of steam to be disgorged shortly after you remove the weight of the bowl, causing a tidal wave of boiling water across the kitchen. Of course, I remembered this and totally did not end up leaping round the kitchen clutching one hand and trying not to yell anything that might offend ChrisC's parents.

Getting it out of the bowl is about as easy as you'd expect wrangling a boiling-hot bowl full of boiling-hot treacle to be. ChrisC's mum commented on the plastic bowl, and when I started to tell her the story said "oh, they're all the wrong shape these days". Does anyone actually know if it's possible to make a decent pudding in one of these new-fangled shallow bowls?

Anyway, the pudding was a treacley triumph, and went down very well. With, of course, lashings of custard.



So, treacle pudding: time-consuming, but easier than you think. Especially if you buy a plastic bowl with a lid.

Next stop: crystallized ginger pudding.

[*] Just to make sure we're all on the same page: a treacle pudding is a steamed sponge pudding made with golden syrup. If you're reading in America, then my understanding is that there's no direct equivalent of golden syrup. Recipes I've found direct you to mix two parts corn syrup two one part molasses, but most of them also recommend you scour your local shops for the proper stuff first.