I've never made stiff sticky toffee pudding before.
My head is a scramble recently. Politics, economics, the change in weather, ever-shifting personal circumstances, running a start-up publishing house, writing another cookbook, cooking, eating, being and living. It’s a life, sure, but it’s a lot, too.
I’m currently reading, or have very recently finished reading, Rebecca May Johnson’s ‘Small Fires’, ‘London Feeds Itself’ edited by Jonathan Nunn, ‘Trust’ by Hernan Diaz, and ‘The Anarchy’ by William Dalrymple.
The sum of all of this is a cerebrum that feels like cake mix, everything tossed in together, partially mixed, destined to collapse under pressure.
To put it bluntly, I’m in need of small but achievable joy. Hence a craving for sticky toffee pudding. Perhaps for the first time ever. As I say, I've never made it before.
Why sticky toffee pudding?
At some level, I suppose, the correct answer is, why not?
I have no history with sticky toffee pudding. It holds a place in my mind that represents a few things, none of them necessarily good. Prior to this craving, if you said the words sticky toffee pudding to me, my mind goes straight to bad pub food or microwave meals from M&S service stations, or to Charlie Binghams or those awful Gü puddings that reward you with a little glass ramekin for your sins. For clarity, these references are not things I find particularly joyful.
Sticky toffee pudding is a cloying thing. Often it's the crescendo of an overpriced meal in a pub or restaurant you wish you’d never entered, you might have thrown caution to the wind, think ‘ah sod it, I’ll have a sticky toffee pudding, see if we can’t rescue this’ and as always, it doesn't rescue it all.
And yet, I’m craving sticky toffee pudding.
My little personal obsession, as plays out each week in this newsletter, is considering, researching thinking about, writing about and cooking British food. I spend my time looking backwards, finding and cooking things from my recent past, nostalgia, from contemporary culture. Sticky toffee pudding doesn’t really fit into that mould. The dish itself was invented only in the 70s. It's not part of a long tradition. The original idea came to these shores from a Canadian via a pub in Cumbria, or Yorkshire, or Aberdeen, depending on who you listen to.
I'm minded of ‘London Feeds Itself’, where the focus is initially on place, be it pub, community centre, allotment, or temple, which is then a gateway to discussing London and its communities and its food.
Sticky toffee pudding defies being approached in this way. There's no urban versus rural narrative, no underground and gritty versus bourgeois and bucolic, no historical relevance in which say the miners sustain themselves on it or high society popularizes it before it filters down and becomes an everyday thing, it wasn't introduced by a king or a queen or insinuated into our culture as part of our shameful trading and marauding across the globe. It barely stands up to scrutiny, and barely announces itself as having come from the pub, restaurant, tea room or home kitchen. It is just a saccharine pudding that became a symbol of a certain type of pub menu or a certain type of reheatable dessert.
And yet, it is the thing I've been craving.
What we cook each day is a result of myriad forces, myriad decisions. I suppose we're always dealing with our own base cravings, but they’re at the mercy of a broader context. What is in the fridge? What shops do I pass on my journey home? How much money is in the bank account? What’s been in the news today? Did Ukraine repeal an offensive? Did some undeserving soul get killed again? Did I pig out at lunch? Where is Stanley Tucci now? Did Utd get drubbed? What was that podcast on factory farming? Did you read the interview with the regenerative winemaker? Did the meeting go well? Was I too aggressive in that email? Was it warmer than expected today? Is it due to rain this weekend? Am I fed up with eating pasta? Did you see that meme about pumpkins?
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