I wasn’t looking forward to saying goodbye to Delia, but I was excited that for this penultimate entry, I would be tackling puddings. Growing up as I did in a house where dessert consisted of Petit Filous on a good day, soft fruit most days and cucumber when my mother was preoccupied, the prospect of making my own puddings was particularly exciting.
And, as Delia writes, Britain has an “unmatched reputation for steamed, boiled and baked puddings”, making the whole thing quite a thrill. My original plan was to cook three of these recipes and to report back on which was the best after a series of controlled experiments, or, in other words, after eating a lot of pudding. There are a lot of delights to choose from in this chapter, but I opted for the three that use my favourite ingredients: chocolate, lemon, and bread.
My carefully thought-through plan, though, collided with Theresa May’s unmatched reputation for duplicity, double-dealing and broken promises. You may recall that a few weeks ago, the Prime Minister decided that she would, in fact, be going for an early election after all. This has meant that my Peter Parkeresque day job – writing about politics – has taken over, and I have had to fit my Spider-Man-style alter-ego activities into the oddest times of day, or, in some cases, the dead of night.
I started with Delia’s warm chocolate rum souffles with chocolate sauce, on the evening after Theresa May accused the European Union of plotting to put Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street. This recipe is two easy steps – melt dark chocolate, rum and double cream; whisk in egg yolks – followed by one difficult step: whisk egg whites into stiff peaks. Then you put them all together in the oven and cook for about 10 minutes, if you are doing them in small pots, or double that if you are doing one gigantic souffle.
It may be that whisking the egg whites is simplicity itself, but as I was desperately making calls to find out the “reaction from the rest of Europe” (short answer: they think we’re going crazy), I ended up whisking my whites at past midnight on a Friday night with my phone glued to my ear. As a result, half of the resulting souffles were lighter than air – the other half were very dense. And despite even the dense ones being perfectly nice, it was all just a little too rich and too dark for me. Delia is dubious about the value of milk chocolate in cooking, but for my money this recipe would work better with milk rather than dark chocolate.
What I wouldn’t change at all is Delia’s lemon sponge puddings with lemon curd cream, the second pudding I tried. This, again, is very easy – assemble the puddings in small parcels in a baking tray, then remove and steam.
I had hoped to make my own lemon curd for the purposes of the recipe, but instead I spent the best part of the weekend listening to Tim Farron’s answering machine, and so had to use shop-bought curd instead. It has a lot more sugar in it than Delia’s recipe does, and the resulting puddings, while delicious, were just a tad too sweet. So my advice is either to make your own curd or halve the size of the pudding.
The best of the bunch was the third I tried, Delia’s spiced bread pudding, though I did end up making significant changes to her recipe, by accident as much as design. It calls for stale bread. As I am yet to crack the art of baking bread that doesn’t move instantly from fresh to hairy, I bought a loaf, and it worked fine. The recipe also calls for the bread to be soaked in milk, and the currants, sultanas and peel in brandy, for 30 minutes each. Moments, however, after the milk hit the bread, and the brandy the fruit, the entirety of Labour’s manifesto was leaked to the press, which meant that I didn’t get back to the bread or the fruit for the best part of 90 minutes.
I worried that soaking the bread and raisins for that long might ruin the dish, which led me to the realisation that, if you ever have to work late, there’s nothing that puts everything else in perspective quite like silently outsourcing your worries about your job to fretting about the state of the bread and dried fruit in the other room.
I needn’t have been anxious though – the pud was delicious, soft and with a wonderful hit of brandy. It didn’t work quite as well the second time around, when I only gave it the recommended 30 minutes. So, that’s one good thing to come out of this election, at least.
