Go on a treacly pudding trail with Kunal Vijayakar

Whatever the meal at home, there was always pudding at the end. It’s strange; I cannot remember when we started using the word ‘dessert’. It was always ‘sweet dish’, ‘ice-cream’ or ‘pudding’. The question at the end of every meal was, “What’s for pudding?” And there was always something.

But ‘pudding’ is an intriguing and beguiling word. While on the one hand there is a bread and butter pudding, which is a sweet dish made of bread, milk and eggs, on the other, a Yorkshire pudding is a savoury puff baked beneath the roast beef in the oven.

If a Christmas pudding is a steamed, fruit-filled cake flambéed with alcohol and served with brandy butter, then a pease pudding (or pease porridge) is a savoury dish made of boiled legumes, split yellow peas and spices, cooked with bacon or ham.

So then what really is a pudding? Is it sweet or savoury? One definition says that anything boiled or steamed in a basin or cloth is a pudding. Of course in some dishes, like black pudding and Haggis, the intestines are used instead of a cloth. Which makes sausages pudding as well. Now I am totally confused. 

So I decided to dig into this a bit. I found out that the word ‘pudding’ comes, in all probability, from the Latin word ‘botellus’, which means sausage. It was introduced to Britain by the Romans, who created sausages and brought them into that country in the 1st century CE.

So obviously the pudding is a British invention. And just look what the Brits did with that. They took what was obviously a sausage and turned it into dessert. And that’s what I am going to stick with in this column: sweet pudding or dessert.

The simplest of all puddings is the custard. For all of you who think that custard is made with a powder that comes out of a box, please pay attention to this carefully. Real custard is not made from custard powder but is sweetened milk or cream that is thickened with the help of eggs.

Making custard without curdling the milk or burning it, is an art. The best way to make custard is to boil milk or cream in a bowl. In another bowl, whisk eggs and caster sugar. Now slowly start adding the hot milk to the egg-sugar mixture while stirring constantly. You can then flavour the custard with vanilla. If you want to set the custard, you can either bake it or just cook it over a double boiler. Now this custard can be the prelude of things wonderful. 

Like a trifle pudding, for instance. An English trifle is a dessert with layers: custard, wine-soaked cake, mixed fruit, jam, whipped cream. When chilled, the many textures of squishy fruit, silken custard, moist cake and jam come together to bring nothing short of joy.

My all-time favourite, though, is a bread and butter pudding. My grandmum used to make the best one. She’d always use stale brun pav. She would cut the brun and toast the slices. Once golden and crisp, she would butter both sides, then layer a tray with the slices; make a thick, creamy vanilla-flavoured custard, and pour it all over the bread. This would then be garnished with raisins and sprinkled with demerara sugar and set aside to soak for a few hours. The tray would then go into the oven till the pudding was crispy and brown on the top. When you cut a slice, the pudding would first go crunch and then go squish with a puff of vanilla steam.

The Baked Alaska is a pudding that has slowly gone extinct in Mumbai. The only place I know of, that still serves it is Gaylords at Churchgate. This is how they describe it: Vanilla sponge, layered with fruit, topped with ice-cream, peaked with snowy meringue, flambéed with brandy. That’s exactly what it is. To elaborate, really-frozen-hard ice-cream is either scooped or sliced and placed in a baking dish and then lined with slices of sponge and covered with a stiffly beaten egg-whites-and-caster-sugar mix, to make a meringue. The dish is then placed in a very hot oven for a very short time. Just enough to caramelise the meringue, making sure the heat does not melt the ice-cream. The stiff meringue is then doused in brandy and lit. Again, it’s a melody of crunch and squish and a mélange of textures and flavours.

The most overrated of all puddings, according to me, is the blancmange. A few years ago the little Italian sister of the blancmange, the panna cotta, became the dessert in vogue. This wobbly dish with little character is nothing but flavoured milk thickened with gelatin. In my opinion a blancmange is only as exciting as the mould it’s set in.

The one that excites me most is a lemon pudding. It’s the yummiest of all. It’s made with eggs, flour, sugar and lemon juice. It’s baked in a double boiler and must be chilled before eating. You know you’ve got it right when the pudding separates and the top is crusty and cake-like while at the bottom is tarty and zesty lemony sauce. For me, one helping of this miracle is never enough.

So there you have it, a few of my favourite puddings. But you’ll never know the joy of them unless you try to make one yourself, and let it consume you. Because the proof of the pudding, is indeed in the eating.