Essay 2: Summer Pudding

A new series of essays written and read by the very popular Fiona Stafford, Professor of Literature at Somerville College, Oxford, following her much praised series of essays The Meaning of Trees and Composers and their Dogs. Here Fiona explores some of the world’s favourite puddings, all of which have surprising stories and have become symbols far beyond the pudding bowl.

Summer pudding, supposedly quintessentially English, (mixed berries encased in juice-soaked stale bread) began life as a symbol of health food for weight conscious American women over a century ago. It’s an invention from Victorian times, originally called ‘hydropathic pudding’, (low-calorie dessert for US health spas). Key ingredients: berries, sugar and stale bread. The changing variety of berries charts the growth of global trading and capitalism. Through this relatively low-calorie dessert we explore how, before refined sugar, desserts were not seen as an especially unhealthy course. Poorer families would have soup and a hearty dessert, as their main meal, with desserts much more likely to be fruit and wholegrain based. Summer pudding symbolises millennia of puddings that were not calorie bombs of refined, hyper-processed ingredients with little nutritional value, quite the reverse. The colours in summer pudding are a large part of its enduring success. Cutting into a summer pudding is like conducting a surgical operation; oozing with deep purple and blood-red syrupy fruit juices; a dramatic pudding that impresses and surprises us all; gory theatre on the dinner table.

Producer – Turan Ali