How To Make
Lemon Surprise
Pudding
Delicate English puddings deserve a renaissance reckons this chef and food writer who recommends this tangy classic.
I have known of this lovely lemon pudding recipe for 36 years. I was 16 and my mother had just got Margaret Costa's Four Seasons Cookery Book, which I immediately and passionately devoured. A handsome tome with a deep green cover, it made me think it was food, more than anything else, that I wished to learn about. Algebra, biology, the fact that Dartmoor is a granite region, how Lady Macbeth kept washing her hands – all that could go and take a running jump. Ever since, I have regarded Costa's food writing as up there with the greatest.
She must have been using this recipe long before the volume's 1970 publication by Thomas Nelson and Sons Limited of London. And it is interesting to note that
this publisher's other outposts included Nairobi, Lusaka, Dar es Salaam and San Fernando in Trinidad and Tobago. I can only imagine that a gentle, sweet number such as this dish would have felt like a reminder of a distant home for expats in all of those places, and still would.
Delicate little English puddings are, I strongly feel, one of the things very much missing from our current culinary repertoire. Unlike the highly convoluted restaurant confections – towers, tuiles, drizzles, smears, and dustings – that we get these days, a bowl of this lemon surprise will surely have your guests clamouring for second helpings. Which you can then offer them.
Now then, it is very important to understand the make-up of this unusual recipe. A friend of some very good friends of mine attempted to make it not just once, but three times. On each occasion she decided to ditch her attempt even before putting it into the oven. The reason for her despair is that towards the end of the mixing and folding-in process, the sponge-like batter – which is basically what it is – appears so curdled and separated that one thinks it cannot possibly turn out correctly. Costa doesn't mention this in her original recipe (although since then others sensibly have), but I think one should – for heaven's sake! – give it a go the first time, however bonkers it looks in the mixing bowl. With all this in mind, you should not be put off by the minuscule amount of flour listed in the ingredients – it is correct – nor allow yourself to be surprised by the seemingly infeasible quantity of milk required. That the pudding works at all is the most surprising thing of all, one might think. Well, it does work.
When I last cooked the pudding, I decided to try it in different containers: I put half in a traditional, oval Pyrex dish (almost exactly the same as the one that Mum used the first time she made it) and shared the
rest of the mixture between smaller, individual pots. I am now in a quandary over which is the more successful. The individual ones may look a touch prettier, dinkier even, and take a shorter time to cook, but the bigger dish gives a little more of the lemon curd-like sauce that is naturally produced in the base of the dish as the sponge topping rises and sets. And, of course, it is this, as Margaret Costa so perfectly puts it in her recipe, that is 'the charming little surprise'.
'Second Helpings of Roast Chicken' by Simon Hopkinson is published by Ebury Press, priced £12.
Prices correct at time of publication.