A pudding for every day of the year
Orange snow, Paradise pie… a dusty old bookshop find has opened my eyes to Aotearoa’s impressive pudding history and stirred my (already quite substantial) pudding obsession.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter produced in partnership with Boring Oat Milk. Written by me, Charlotte Muru-Lanning. It’s lovely to have you here!
In most circumstances, I’d be put off by a book locked away inside one of those wooden and glass display cases you find in secondhand bookshops. While understandably kept safe from sweaty hands and sticky fingers, my curiosity is usually overcome by intimidation. And so those books stay put, and I go home with a tinge of regret.
Recently though, I braved the unlocking and ended up with a very special copy of 365 Puddings: One for every day of the year, that’s almost a century old. Published by Whitcombe and Tombs, it’s unique, with a calendar-style format and a charming red, green and brown screen-printed cover. Established in Christchurch in 1882, for a period, Whitcombe and Tombs was one of New Zealand’s largest and most preeminent booksellers and publishers, and it later became Whitcoulls.
As is common with cookbooks of the period, there’s a frustrating lack of context given, like when the book was published (although, an online source estimates 1941) or where the recipes came from (other than that they were “compiled by a New Zealand housewife”, who otherwise remains anonymous). In some way that only adds to the mystique though.
Last year, around this time, I wrote about pudding. And I still firmly believe what I wrote back then, that “pudding in a bowl is one of those quintessential summer festive foods – chilled, aesthetically pleasing, nostalgic and perfect for sharing,” and also “you don’t need to wait till Christmas day to make one.”
And 365 Puddings does as it promises, suggesting seasonally appropriate puddings for each day in the calendar year, with of course, special attention given to the Christmas period. Some of the suggestions seem curious: tomato pudding, macaroni custard, cabinet pudding and potato pie, others are magnificently named: orange snow, snow white pudding and paradise pie. Needless to say, I’ll be quite literally whipping up some of these as soon as I can. The most valuable element of this book though? The way it offers a peek into the expectations of puddings past.
My enthusiasm for puddings absolutely goes beyond the normal, and it’s not just because I appreciate a bountiful kitschy dessert. It’s because the transformation of puddings over time is a fascinating reflection of social and economic evolutions.
There’s evidence, for example, if you trace cookbooks of the last century, of a decline in hot, steamed and boiled puddings since the 1950s, which seemingly lost the popularity contest to the chilled variety – think, trifles, creams and snows – after the advent of cheap home freezers. Suet fell out of fashion, in favour of butter. And then later on, as bulk-ice cream and ready-made pies and cakes were popularised, pudding-eating altogether declined.
In her book From Kai to Kiwi Kitchen, food anthropologist Helen Leach writes of the undisputed British influence of the pudding in New Zealand, a category denoting a boiled or steamed dish, often containing starch, fat, egg, spices and dried fruit. American influence brought fanciful cold additions like Baked Alaska and Lemon Chiffon Pie which expanded the British categorisation of the word pudding, and helped popularise the use of the word “dessert” (to the dismay of the British) as a course name to describe puddings of all types.
Or, take the history of the culture surrounding traditional puddings of Polynesia, including Aotearoa, which were imbued with a notable mana and luxuriousness. The wonderful and varied world of puddings is an enchanting one.
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Weekly bites
Food insecurity isn’t exactly a new phenomena, but coupled with rising cost of living and the delicious connotations of the Christmas period, the need is even greater right now. In a report on RNZ, The Auckland City Mission says the 500 food parcels it provided each week to families before Covid-19, rose to 2000 at the height of the outbreak. And the need has not dropped since. Meanwhile, Wellington’s Downtown Community Ministry food bank told RNZ that their stocks were already lower than they normally are before heading into the Christmas period. Food banks are obviously not the answer, but in the meantime, unfortunately they’re necessary, so consider this a salient reminder to make any Christmas donations (ideally in the form of money rather than tins) as early as possible.
History is steeped in ideas and conversations had in cafes and coffee houses the world over. They’ve bred activists, writers and artists, and a sense of community. Spinoff staff writer (and editor of The Weekend) Shanti Mathias writes on the vital role of cafes in New Zealand communities, and how the pandemic, a challenge for many of those cafes, has only emphasised their importance in the eyes of those who rely on a morning coffee and a scone.
One of the many negative byproducts of our drinking culture is sexual harm. In fact, a New Zealand report from 2013 estimated that more than 10,000 sexual assaults occur each year in New Zealand involving a perpetrator who had been drinking. In response, a police-led campaign called Don't Guess the Yes, running since 2018 in Wellington’s bars and clubs, is set to be rolled out in Auckland next week, reports RNZ. The campaign, targeted at young men, focusses on consent when partying or alcohol are involved and has seen support from the industry and students alike.
I’m fairly certain I’m outside Monster Energy’s target market. That would explain why I’ve never actually tasted the taurine-filled cans. In fact, other than a radio host who would arrive cradling at least three cans of the stuff as we switched shifts after my own show, I’m unsure I know anyone who has. And so, until reading this article from Punch, I’ve lived my life blissfully unaware of the community of enthusiasts and collectors of the cans, some of whom don’t even drink the stuff.
What do you do when a dinner party goes wrong?
New from Searchlight Pictures, The Menu is a darkly comic film about a couple (Anya Taylor-Joy and Nicholas Hoult) who travel to eat at an exclusive island restaurant, where a chef (Ralph Fiennes) has prepared a menu with some shocking surprises. To celebrate its release in cinemas today, we asked a few local hospo heroes for their top tips to control any potential dinner party chaos.
Read the full story on The Spinoff here, and book tickets to see The Menu now. (Sponsored)
The weekly snack
NinetyNine Street Casstavas Sweet and Tangy Cassava chips, $1.79 from PAK’n’SAVE: I’m about half-sure that one of my high school friends will correct me here, but the only chips our school tuck shop sold were the now discontinued Krispa Sweet and Tangy chips. Memory is, of course, a flawed measure of truth, in fact I can’t even find online evidence that they ever existed, but in any case within my teenage-world they were the only chip I cared about. But what is sweet and tangy? And also, if sea air, sumac and tomatoes can all be described as tangy, what the hell is tangy? Those are the big, profound questions I’ve pondered as over the years I’ve desperately attempted to recreate in my mind the flavour of those metallic red bagged chips. This is to say, when I saw another “sweet and tangy” flavour, albeit on a different style of chip, I had to give it a go. While in texture, these were a far cry from the paper thin chips that live rent-free in my memories, I was delighted to find the flavour remarkably similar. An unexpected detour down memory lane. 8.5/10.
In the first instalment of our food newsletter I wrote about sharing bowls of boil up over big round tables at my marae. Each week, as I sit down and write the newsletter, my hope is that each of you feels in some way part of a big shared table where we get to talk about the vital political, social, trendy, personal and delicious aspects of this country’s diverse and ever-changing culinary landscape. It’s so lovely to have you here, and we rely on our members to make that possible. If you’re not a member already and want to support us, please consider signing up. Tautoko mai, let’s keep a good thing going!
Talk next week!
Hei kōnā mai, Charlotte
