The Sacred Art of Eating

To start a new tradition, we needed a properly ‘traditional’ start, a real puddings’ pudding, if you will.

• Roly Poly Pudding

There were a few minor disasters along the way, but the end result was a sweet, gooey, fudgey delight of a pud that went very nicely with our pot of tea.First off was the use of the ready rolled short crust pastry. This is one of the few recipes which doesn’t call for ready made All Butter pastry, so I’d been able to get the pastry locally. I took it out of the fridge at the allotted time, and as I began to unroll it, a thin strip broke off down the side. Alarmed, I fished out the instructions: To avoid splitting, take out of the fridge at least 40 minutes before use it intoned, solemnly. Then the buzzer went, our guests arriving 20 minutes earlier than expected.There was little I could do about the pastry, so in the end I ended up clumping it all back together and rolling it out the traditional way. Of course then I failed to come up with the required 18cm by 32.5 cm (!!- presumably this is the precise size of the packet ready-rolled stuff Nigella uses) and began to feel more and more stressed. Not quite what you’d expect cooking from a chapter called Instant Calmer.My next gripe regards Nigella’s continued insistence on specifying weights of golden syrup. The syrup was to be spread onto the pastry, so it wasn’t even that I could weigh directly into a pan. No matter what, I had to dirty a bowl, and in doing so, lose syrup along the way. What do you do, measure out extra and write it off as collateral damage? As it was, I probably had less syrup than I should have. On the other hand, my sheet of pastry was a bit raggedly looking (I’d rolled and re-rolled it so many times I was sure it would shrink to a tiny chewy mass) so I figured a little too little syrup wouldn’t harm anyone.

Into the oven it went, and I joined my guests. After the half an hour, Dougal brewed the tea, I fished out the ice cream and I pulled the sweet smelling pud from the oven. It didn’t look like much. In the book it is a rich and glossy golden colour. This was pasty and white, a bit dry on top with a puddle of milk around it. It improved on serving, I’ll give it that; the melted syrup swam out and melded with the milk, and in cross section the pudding looked soggy in all the right ways and had a lovely gooey squidgy consistency.

Our ice cream, for reasons I don’t fully understand, was the consistency of chocolate mousse, and so unfortunately all but melted on contact with the hot pudding. This was a bit of a shame as you did need it to cut across the all-but-overwhelming sweetness of the pudding. Melted away it wasn’t as potent a contrast. We checked the freezer though, and it seems okay. Duff batch of ice cream?I’m not quite sure why Roly Poly Pudding didn’t have the good looks of the recipe version. Perhaps, in light of the other shortcomings, I ought to have cut down on the milk a little. Perhaps the top of the pud would have coloured up nicely had I poured the milk over the top as well as down the sides as instructed. Who knows. Either way, I’m not writing this dish off. It fills a good niche of stodgy wintry comfort food pudding, like a sticky toffee pudding, and was dead easy to make, albeit with a fight with the pastry (but once I’m a grown up I’ll be able to throw together my own short-crust pastry in a flash, right?). Lovely for a Sunday night, just not a showy-offy dessert.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS