An Exploration of Pudding

Today is my oldest niece’s birthday!  She’s turning 12.  Happy birthday, Elizabeth!

Coincidentally, it’s also Queen Elizabeth II’s birthday.  She’s turning 85.  If she makes it 5 more years, she’ll be the longest reigning English monarch ever.  Pretty cool, huh?

I think it’s appropriate to celebrate Her Majesty the Queen’s birthday with a post about traditional English pudding.

Most of us Americans believe that pudding looks like this:

Homemade chocolate pudding.  One of my favorites!

However, England has a more liberal definition of pudding.  For instance, this is pudding:

Black pudding, aka blood sausage

As is this:

Remember this?  Yorkshire pudding!

It’s all very confusing if you’re not familiar with English tradition.  But basically, a pudding in England is traditionally baked, and it can be anything from black pudding (a black colored sausage) to rice pudding.  And rice pudding is what we’re going to cover today. 

I pulled rice pudding from The Secret Garden.  The movie was always a favorite of mine as a child, because the main character’s name was Mary and she hated “Mary Mary Quite Contrary” being sung at her just as much as I did.  But it’s also a great story.  The author, Frances Hodgson Burnett describes Mary Lennox after she comes in from playing in the garden:

[Mary] had such red cheeks and such bright eyes and ate such a dinner that Martha was delighted.

“Two pieces o’ meat and two helps o’ rice puddin’!" she said. "Eh!  Mother will be pleased when I tell her what th’ skippin’-rope’s done for thee.” (Hodgson Burnett 102-3)

I have seen rice pudding referenced in a lot of other British literature, so I decided to try it.  To my recollection, I have never had rice pudding before this week.  My sisters or mom might tell me otherwise, but trying it on Monday was like trying it for the first time to me.

Most Americans think they have tried rice pudding.  They have probably eaten something like this:

 Or, even better, this:

*shudders* I’m sorry, but if you think you’ve tried homemade pudding, any flavor, by making it from a Jello packet, you are woefully mistaken.  Pudding (the American kind) isn’t even worth the effort unless it’s truly homemade – with milk, eggs, cornstarch and sugar.  Oh man, my mouth is watering thinking of it.

Sorry, that was a tangent.  My point is, rice pudding came from England, and is traditionally baked.   It isn’t much like “Americana” pudding at all.  I got my recipe from food.com, but I did a little research first.  A couple other recipes include eggs, which I liked, but they also include weird ingredients that didn’t seem very traditional, like lemon sauce or raisins.  So I chose this one, because it is not too complex, with subtle flavors that could almost classify it as bland.  It wouldn’t be British otherwise.  :)

Notes: The original recipe called for a vanilla bean.  I replaced it with vanilla extract.  Also, this recipe calls for “caster sugar,” which is a really fine sugar, much like powdered sugar, except that powdered sugar has cornstarch in it to keep it from getting lumpy.  I put granulated sugar in a blender and blended it for about 30 seconds.  Voila!  Caster sugar.  You could probably get away with using powdered sugar, though.

Blending the sugar

Left: Blended, Right: granulated.  The blended one looks lumpy because it lacks corn starch, unlike powdered sugar.

Traditional Baked English Rice Pudding

·  2 ½ cup whole milk

·  1 ½ tsp vanilla

·  ½ cup short-grain rice

·  3 tablespoons caster sugar

·  2 tablespoons butter

·  1 teaspoon cinnamon

·  1 teaspoon nutmeg

1. Preheat the oven to 300°F.
2. Put the rice and sugar in an ovenproof dish. Pour the milk over the rice. Stir in Add the spices and vanilla and stir to mix, then dot the surface with butter.
3. Bake uncovered for 2 hours. After about 40 minutes, stir the surface skin into the pudding, and repeat this after a further 40 minutes.
4. Allow the pudding to finish cooking for the final 40 minutes without stirring.

After 1st 40 min.  It was pretty much still liquid.

After 2nd 40 min. Hardened skin on top, but liquidy underneath.

After last 40 min.  All done!

Follow the directions exactly, and you’ll get traditional rice pudding!  It’s a yummy treat.  Cut it into squares and serve.  I like it better cold than hot, but you can serve it both ways.

Enjoy!

P.S. If you're interested in learning more about black pudding, click here or here. Be prepared to be grossed out!

Yorkshire Pudding

This is the week!  Are you ready for five fun-packed days of fabulous foreign foods and favorite (or favourite)... friends of... fffff..... yeah, I ran out of Fs.  But are you ready?!

Alright, so we cooked the top winners on the poll (Results can be found on my Tues, November 9^th post), as well as a couple of extra things.  We’ll be posting something everyday.  My post today is on Yorkshire pudding.

We Americans generally think pudding comes in three flavors: chocolate, vanilla, and tapioca.  In England, however, pudding is more often a dinner dish than a dessert (what’s with me and alliterations today?).  I’m sure you have heard of the infamous black/blood pudding.  Things like that sound less than appealing, but it’s fun to try new things.  My adventures with food in England included things like fish and chips, sandwiches, Cornish pasties, roast duck, and lots of chocolate.  No pudding.  So I decided to try some Yorkshire pudding and really get a feel for the following scene in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, during the start of term feast.

“There are house-elves here?” [Hermione] said, staring, horror-struck, at Nearly Headless Nick.  “Here at Hogwarts?”

“Certainly,” said Nearly Headless Nick, looking surprised at her reaction.  “The largest number in any dwelling in Britain, I believe.  Over a hundred.” [...]

Hermione looked down at her hardly-touched plate of food, then put her knife and fork down upon it and pushed it away from her.

“Oh c’mon, ‘Er-my-knee,” said Ron, accidentally spraying Harry with bits of Yorkshire pudding.  “Oops – sorry, ‘Arry –”  He swallowed.  “You won’t get them sick leave by starving yourself!”  (Rowling 181-182)

Naturally, I wondered exactly how disgusting it would be to get bits of half-chewed Yorkshire pudding sprayed on you.  Poor Harry.  First Voldemort kills his parents, and now Ron is spitting food at him.  He has a hard lot.

Yorkshire pudding requires beef drippings to make.  Meat drippings, in case you aren’t aware, are basically drips of melted fat that ooze out of the meat as it cooks.  It sounds totally nasty, but it is really flavorful and delicious.  And if you’ve ever had homemade gravy, you’ve had drippings, because that’s where all the flavor comes from.  Cooking the meat also adds a nice protein to your meal.  Coincidentally, it mentions Harry eating “a sizeable chunk of steak” (Rowling 181) in the same scene.

So before you can make the actual pudding, you have to make a beef roast of some kind and catch the drippings.  My mom made a small sirloin tip, which yielded just enough drippings for a two-person pudding.  I stuffed the meat with slices of fresh garlic by cutting holes in the meat all over the top and sides and sliding the garlic in. Then we coated it with lots of salt, pepper and garlic powder, and dabbed on some olive oil.  After that it was ready to pop in the oven on a broiler pan (this is a special pan that catches drippings well.  Click here to view) and bake. The temperature and amount of time depends on the size of your meat and how well done you want it. We baked our 2 lb roast at 400 F for about an hour, until the pop-up thermometer popped up.  For hints on cooking your particular roast, you can try consulting allrecipes.com.

Cooked sirloin tip

Alright, now that that is taken care of, on to the pudding! 

 Yorkshire Pudding

(serves 2.  If you want to calculate for a specific amount of servings, click here for the source recipe on Allrecipes.com)

¼ cup and 2 tbps all purpose flour

1/8 tsp of salt

1 egg

3 tbsp water

2 tbsp beef drippings

3 tbsp milk

1. Mix flour and salt together until blended. Make a well in the flour (a hole in the middle), add the milk, and whisk until consistent. Beat the eggs into the batter (this may take a little while).

Just after adding the eggs, but before beating them

Add water and beat again until the mixture is light and frothy.  Refrigerate for an hour.  (That last bit is unnecessary.  I didn’t do it).

2. If the batter has been refrigerated, allow it to come up to room temperature before using. When the roast beef is ready to come out of the oven, ready the mixture.
3. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.  Pour off drippings from roast beef and measure out desired amount (about 1/2 cup should do). Pour drippings into a small loaf pan (again, for larger measurements, see the source recipe) and place into the oven until the drippings sizzle. Pour the batter over the drippings and bake for 30 minutes (or until the sides have risen and are golden brown). Cut into two portions and serve immediately, otherwise it will fall.

Here’s what it looks like.  It’s a little weird looking, I know.

Before baking

After baking.  No, I don't know why one side it higher than the other.

We also made mashed potatoes, just because it seemed fitting.  I was delighted later, though, as I read the Goblet of Fire scene and saw this:

“Aaah, ‘at’s be’er,” said Ron, with his mouth full of mashed potato.  (Rowling 181)

  

Follow this recipe for the best mashed potatoes you will ever make.  They don't even need gravy.  They're that good.

Mashed Potatoes

(serves 3-4)

4 small, peeled potatoes.

2 tbsp butter

½ tsp salt

1/3 cup sour cream

1 clove garlic, minced

Heavy whipping cream, to desired consistency.

1.      Chop the potatoes into small slices and boil until they are soft and a fork stabbed into them goes through smoothly.  Drain.

2.      Put potatoes in a large mixing bowl with butter, salt, garlic, and sour cream.   

Potatoes before mixing. Caution: They will be hot!

     With a hand mixer, beat potatoes until they are smooth.  Add cream as you beat until you get your potatoes to the desired consistency. Be sure to taste the potatoes to make sure they are salty enough.  Serve.

Mashed potatoes!  One of my favorite foods.

Here’s the whole meal.  My mom made cream of asparagus soup to go with it, but that’s not really part of the Harry Potter thing.  Leave a comment if you want that recipe.

The spread

My plate of deliciousness

Below is me trying the Yorkshire pudding.  I know it looks rather unappetizing, but it was delicious!  It tasted like a soft, buttery pastry with a little salt from the drippings.  I will definitely make it again!  But I still wouldn’t want Ron to spit it on me.

And for the fun of it, here are some of my England pictures of Harry Potter sites.  I will give you the names of the actual places.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to leave a comment naming which Harry Potter movie each of them are from, and the context of that scene, if you can. 

#1 - King's Cross Station, London.  I was walking around the station and wandered up some stairs.  Suddenly, I gasped, "Oh my gosh! This is from the scene in the ____ movie when___!"  Then I took a picture.  Do you recognize it, too? 

#2 - Christ's Church College, Oxford University, Oxford

#3 - This one is sort of cheating.  The Harry Potter movie crew didn't film here, but they modeled their set after this room, which is the dining hall at Christ's Church College, Oxford.  They also used it in multiple movies.  But it should be pretty obvious.

#4 - Millennium Bridge, London

 I apologize for the poor quality of the England pictures.  I had a 2 megapixel dinosaur at the time.  But I hope you had fun guessing! 

Back to Back Posts: English Food

So after I wrote the last post, I was talking to Mary about English food. Both of us have been lucky enough to go to England (not together, unfortunately). I had a great time there and I know Mary loved it there too. I wanted to make a picture post of food that I ate in England, to give you all an idea of what English food is like ...and I just miss England. Here we go! (Caution: you may see me in these pictures as a blonde...this might be weird for some of you)



I had this lovely meal in the Chester Cathedral in Chester, England. That is Dandellion and Burdock soda ( I still have the bottle!) and Tuna with Sweet Corn Sandwich. The soda tasted kind of like...rootbeer and dirt and greenery... But I liked it!


This is an Egg Custard. I was in the town where the Bronte sister's parsonage was and went around the corner from this pub to the little bakery. The lady laughed at me when I asked what it was.


This is Yorkshire pudding. I was totally not expecting it! (Oh the naive girl I was). This is Yorkshire pudding with bangers (sausages). It's pretty good but definitely greasy and salty, like a lot of English food.


Before I left for Europe, my dad was so excited for me to have a Ploughman's lunch. I was excited when I finally got it but it's basically just a sandwich platter. I liked the pearl onions a lot =)


I love this picture. I was at the tea room directly across the street from Jane Austen's house and my friend Annie and I had tea and crumpitts with jam and clotted cream. I'm not even kidding. It was the most picturesque thing of the day!


I love this picture too. I just saw it in a random English town one day...it made me happy =)


This is in London. I was going to have fish and chips when I was by the coast but I was so bus sick I couldn't eat anything. The guy got mad at me because my friend Annie had other food that she wanted to sit down and eat at his restaurant and I ordered fish and chips. When he told me we couldn't eat there, I told him to make it to go...and he was grumpy about it, hence the fork.


Yes, this is also London. Yes it's raining. Yes I'm sitting ON THE GROUND in the middle of one of the dirtiest cities in the world eating sushi. This was right before I was going to see Les Miserables (I was leaning against the theatre). I went to this sushi restaurant that you went through a line with a box and picked out individually wrapped sushi rolls. It was so cool!


This is English junk food! I bought this right before I got on the Chunnel for Paris. I love English chocolate. =)



Oh, so back to the Harry Potter theme...I got to go to Lacock Abbey, where they filmed parts of the first two Harry Potter movies.


This is inside Lacock Abbey...looks like Hogwarts, huh? That's because it is!!


And finally...platform 9 3/4 at King's Cross Station in London. This was an interesting day. I dragged a bunch of my friends to go to this landmark...many of them didn't find it a priority, but I definitely did. I begged the people who came with me to videotape me asking a person in the station "Excuse me, could you tell me where I might find Platform 9 3/4?" (complete with British accent)...but none of them wanted to do it...so I just asked a worker (no British accent) who smiled and told me where it was.

Wow, I miss England now. I wish I could go back as the person I am now. A year ago feels like forever, and I've grown up and learned a lot since then. I want to go back! Oh yeah, I also saw a guy outside the Museum of Modern Art in London that I thought was Daniel Radcliffe. I took a creepy picture of him so I could zoom in and confirm if it was indeed Daniel Radcliffe...it wasn't.