"A good pudding after Sunday lunch on a cold day is the perfect comfort food." So says Carol Wilson, whose new book - a comprehensive overview of heritage recipes, is titled Regional cuisine of England (£25, Waterstones) - contains quite a few. "We are known for our range of delicious puddings," she says. "No other country has such a rich variety of syllabubs, custards and trifles, steamed and baked puddings, milky junkets and possets, fruit tarts and crumbles, bread puddings and more."
So where have they all gone? The frequency with which we eat pudding decreases. Research from Kantar Worldpanel Plus shows that only 49.2 percent of us ate dessert at least once a week in October 2023 - compared to 64.3 percent ten years earlier. It's a long-term decline that appears set to continue, according to another 2023 poll commissioned by Mars Wrigley, which found that 44 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds never make dessert at home.
Treacle tart, steamed sponge and spotted cock are doomed. But Wilson is just one of many people they would like to see revived.
A history of sweet stodge
Our modern understanding of pudding as a sweet dish to end a meal dates back to the 17th century. Until then, puddings were more likely to be savory - a fact commemorated in the name of black pudding. "Pudding recipes evolved as sugar imports became cheaper, cooking techniques became more advanced and people developed a craving for sweet things," says Regula Ysewijn, author of the authoritative historical guide Pride and pudding.
To begin with, these sweet desserts were reserved for the rich and the recipes were refined in the kitchens of great houses. But as sugar prices continued to fall, they found a natural home in increasingly modest kitchens. "Our cold, damp climate called for more robust foods," Wilson explains. "So in the 17th and 18th centuries we created a wide variety of puddings that used fat and sugar to build energy and keep out the cold."
The story continues
Several regional desserts arose from the need to use up seasonal surpluses of locally grown produce. "Southern England was known for its cherry orchards," says Wilson. "The cherry season was short, so puddings such as Kentish cherry batter pudding helped make the most of the harvest." Worcestershire, meanwhile, was known for its apples. These would be used in Malvern pudding, a dish of soft apples and custard under a burnt sugar crust.
Savory ingredients would also get the dessert treatment. "In Lancashire, potatoes were used to make potato harvest pudding," says Wilson. In this unlikely-sounding creation, mashed potatoes are mixed into a batter with butter, sugar, flour, eggs, cider, currants and nutmeg, then baked into something resembling a soufflé. "You don't taste the potatoes," she explains, "they are there to add content."
Then there were puddings designed to use pantry ingredients. This included everyday leftovers such as stale bread, used in bread-and-butter pudding and treacle tart, as well as leftovers banned for religious events: puddings such as Folkstone pudding pie, a currant-studded cheesecake, also known as Kent Lent pie, were developed to to use up eggs, milk and cream before the beginning of the Lenten season.
Other desserts are inspired by local profusions of non-native products, such as Cumberland rum nicky, a pie named for the nicks or cuts made in the crust. This used rum, dates, spices and brown sugar, which came from the Caribbean to Cumbrian ports such as Whitehaven, which were important trading centers in the 19th century.
The importance of regional names
The growth of travel between regions helped undermine this regional diversity, promoting a sense of homogeneity in our taste for sweet things. But according to Ysewijn it has also crystallized our awareness of this regional heritage. "Regional puddings are a relatively recent phenomenon, along with the railways and tourism," she says. "Before the Victorian era, few recipes bore the name of a city or region."
If you had lived in, say, Monmouth all your life, you would be very familiar with the meringue-topped dish with jam and milk-soaked bread that we now call Monmouth pudding. But you wouldn't appreciate its distinctive character until you traveled somewhere else; only then you might need a term to describe it.
Ysewijn believes that this desire to imbue our puds with a regional identity, in keeping with the prevailing cultural mood. "It was part of the Romantic movement," she says, "where dishes were given regional names to create a sense of connection. For example, Bakewell-style puddings were eaten throughout England before it was renamed Bakewell pudding. So the regionalization of Bakewell pudding is probably why we still know it today, but it also caused the pudding to disappear in other areas."
A drop in desserts
Many more would disappear from meals in the 20th century. This trend was exacerbated by the effects of food rationing (sugar rationing remained in place until 1953), by the increasing time pressure on home cooks and by the industrialization of the food industry, which meant that the puddings were often served rather than made.
The desserts that are still popular today meet a different need, says Ysewijn. "We want lighter rates because we don't work in the fields all day. Puddings used to bring food; today they should only bring joy."
Still, Wilson thinks it's high time we rediscover some of our heritage puddings. 'I'd like to see it Bake asking participants to make a little-known pudding from their own region," she says. Ysewijn believes that we should make time to enjoy pudding together. "The pride of British cuisine is its puddings," she says. "Other countries had similar recipes in their age-old cookbooks, but the British really embraced them and developed them into what they became. If you have a sweet tooth, you really haven't lived until you've enjoyed the deliciousness of a British steamed pudding.
