Foreword

Ilove puddings. Sweet, savoury, boiled, steamed, baked and fried – I will eat all of them. But when I say pudding, I mean PUDDING. I don’t mean sweets, or desserts. In modern Britain, pudding has come to mean anything sweet at the end of a meal. Pudding is shorthand for many things I don’t like: overly sweet cakes, Americanised brownies, fruit in anything but its most raw form …

When I want a pudding, I want something solid, something fuelling, something so quintessentially British that it reinforces who I am at a very basic level; and yet it’s something that is so hard to define that in many ways those feelings are the definition.

Pudding’s had a bad press. Someone described as a pudding is overweight, rotund. If a substance is puddinglike, it’s solid, unyielding, stodgy. But there’s something glorious about those very aspects of pudding. Pudding fills the stomach. Pudding salves the soul. Pudding’s very solidity grounds us, and its traditional round or oval shape is unflinchingly simple.

Pudding cuts right to the heart of Britishness. In the eighteenth century, when British cuisine was growing up and developing an identity, pudding was central to British gastronomy. It represented British simplicity, adaptability and perhaps a little bit of thuggishness in the face of the prevailing fashion for French food, criticised as fanciful, wasteful and full of deception. It appeared in satires as a symbol of the Empire, and illustrations as a symbol of family.

The Victorians had puddings for every occasion, recognising that no matter what class you were, and what position you occupied, with a pudding on the table you were all as one. The decline of the pudding, in some ways, echoes a confusion over what nationality and national identity means in the modern world, and whether they are even useful ideas at all.

Of course, we can read too much into it. But I do think that pudding and Britishness are intrinsically linked, and that were we to talk about ‘getting a British’, in the same way we in Britain talk about ‘getting an Indian’ or ‘getting a Chinese’ [meal], then what we’d be getting would be a pudding. And I’d be okay with that.

Prejudiced I may be, but I’m pretty proud of my country’s pudding heritage. You’ll see as you peruse this book, there’s a lot more to pudding than meets the eye. For me, seeing pudding through the eyes of someone who has come to love it, despite the breadth of the North Sea between herself and Pudding Central, is a glorious way to appreciate it even more. Delve in (preferably with a spoon), and enjoy. Here’s to pudding!

Dr Annie Gray, food historian