The Bread and Summer Pudding

I’ll never forget the first time the Summer Pudding arrived at the Christmas table; his bright, fabulous jewel, better than any Christmas red and then the taste and then the cream.

For many years the Summer Pudding arrived with the Pudding Pudding and only at Christmas. Then it was superseded at some stage by the Meringues with berries and cream. Mum loved to make things different.

So go forward many years and I am helping a friend with a special meal at her restaurant and we are turning out the 60 individual Summer Puddings and disaster, the bread is still white. The juices haven’t pushed their way through the bread to perform that magic of berry juiced bread. A rapid response berry operation and the puddings are juiced but the alchemy hasn’t had time to transform the bread. And the critic picks it up.

This set me to wondering over many years why this had occurred and the only solution I can come up with is the bread.

Mum used to use standard, staled white bread but it was many yeas ago before bread improvers, anti-mould agents and general cost savings to the detriment of the bread. And she was a sandwich queen who understood that the crusts must be cut off without squashing the bread so it goes doughy and hard.

Summer Pudding went out of fashion and for me the price of berries became prohibitive for such a large dessert until I wanted to add it to my Christmas workshop menu. I love a blast from the past and it is not a Christmas pudding. I am now an anti-puddinger, like many others perhaps it is just too heavy after such an extravagant meal.

I decided to cut some costs for the photo so I brought frozen berries and having left it for the last moment I thought I would try a loaf of D------s Bread as it was a day old, cheaper and hopefully a bit stale. It was a bit thick but it was just a photo.

I wanted to cut it open for the last shot and so of course I had to try it. There were low expectations because the fruit wasn’t fresh but nothing warned me of the shock of…it was salty! So much for fancy bread for the summer pud.

So if supermarket bread no longer works and artisanal bread a waste of time, what to use?

I go back now to the sandwich making which my mother inspired me to teach when I was at William Angliss as she had taught me so well. I tried every bread possible as the supermarket bread squashed and went doughy, artisan bread was too thick for a cocktail point. Finally, I was driving past a small Milk Bar in Hampton who had loaves lined up in the window that spoke to me. On enquiry I found they were baked by the local Vietnamese bakery and were sliced just as my mother’s were- a proper thin sandwich slice.

So the moral of this tale is to purchase your bread several days ahead, finely sliced by your local Vietnamese baker. Store it in the fridge to get it stale as this is pivotal for the juices to draw through the crumb, don’t squash the bread when cutting off the crusts and make the berries extra juicy just in case and “feed” the pudding when it is in the mold with extra juices before refridgerating, just in case.

E viola, no more white spots.