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[title]‘People love puddings. They hit this nostalgic point of comfort – eating them feels like a hug.’
Chef Terri Mercieca should know: she’s spent much of the winter dishing out old-school steamed sponges from a hatch in London’s Victoria Park via her dessert business Happy Endings. Slabs of sticky toffee pudding floating on lakes of thick custard, delectable rivers of hot chocolate sauce… what better accompaniment to a chilly winter walk? ‘People were really into it, they’d walk past the chalkboard and gasp,’ she says. Now, the pop-up is over and pudding-hungry Londoners have to work a bit harder to get their fix.
‘When it comes to eating out, it feels like savoury is currently king,’ reckons Time Out food and drink editor Leonie Cooper, who’s spotted that even the most ambitious restaurants are shrinking their dessert menus to just a handful of easy-to-prep cold options: in London, freshly opened Mediterranean spot Morchella has only three puds on its expansive small plates menu, while Acme Fire Cult slims things down even further to just two. Elsewhere, you’ll find underwhelming gelato or tarts bearing the chilly, condensation-laced hallmarks of a long stay in the fridge.
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‘It’s hard to find a restaurant that has really good desserts,’ agrees Mercieca. ‘But if you think about it, a dessert is the last thing you eat before you walk out the door. If it’s shit, are you going to go back?’
Even the bougiest restaurants will lavish attention on lengthy menus of sharing plates, but when it gets to the sweet stuff, things often tail off a bit.
A wobbly slab of custard flan. A mousse, straight from the fridge. Or most boring of all, a chilly little globe of sorbet, robed only in a scanty cladding of biscuit crumbs, with a surprising herbal tang to it (rosemary? vetiver?) that was intriguing on the menu but in person feels akin to huffing a Glade air freshener.
Before she started her own dessert operation, Mercieca worked in the kitchens of ambitious London restaurants including Pond Dalston (now closed). That’s given her a real insight into why puddings can be such an afterthought. ‘Everyone’s going to have a main, but they’re not all going to order a dessert. [The mentality is that] not everyone has it, so let’s not focus on it,’ she explains. That means there’s a focus on anything that can be quickly excavated from the freezer or fridge, to take the pressure off overstretched chefs.
There’s a focus on anything that can be quickly excavated from the freezer or fridge to take the pressure off chefs
It’s a far cry from Britain’s fine pudding lineage: many visitors to the UK reckon that our way with the sweet stuff is our cuisine’s main saving grace. ‘Why don’t people from the UK talk about their desserts/puddings when people say they don’t like British cuisine?’ writes one Redditor from the Caribbean, praising the sticky toffee puddings and hot crumbles he discovered here as welcome relief from otherwise ‘average’ menus.
Belgian author Regula Ysewjin fell in love with our puds, too. ‘The British are the only people to grasp the greatness of pudding,’ she writes in her 2017 book ‘Pride and Pudding’, one that chronicles her love affair with all things stodgy and steamed. In fact, international visitors have been enchanted by our puds for centuries. ‘Blessed be he that invented pudding… a manna better than that of the wilderness, because people are never weary of it,’ exalted visiting Frenchman Francois Maximilian Misson in 1698, visiting at a time when hearty steamed puds had become a mainstay of British tables.
Back in medieval times, pudding had meant a mixture of chopped meat and starch, boiled in an animal skin: one survivor of this early era is black pudding. When the first sweet puddings arrived, they had a distinctly experimental flavour. Culinary historian Ivan Day’s book Historic Food documents two unappetising-sounding early seventeenth-century puds: one a mixture of rice and dried fruit boiled in pig guts, the other a musky concoction scented with ambergris (AKA whale vomit).
But things looked up at the end of the century with the invention of the pudding cloth, which meant that delectable sponge-based desserts could be steamed to airy lightness. Entranced by the possibilities of this new method of cooking, inventive cooks soon dreamed up delights like jam roly-poly and plum pudding, as well as the currant-studded, tourist-baffling spotted dick. In Victorian times, fears of food poisoning persuaded British home cooks to boil savoury dishes into tasteless oblivion, but these sweet dishes brought lashings of custard-drenched joy and creativity to our tables.
With such a proud lineage, it feels ironic that British people now seem to be losing their love of puddings. A recent Kantar Worldpanel Plus poll found that only 49.2 percent of us ate dessert at least once a week during October 2023, compared to 64.3 percent a decade ago. But it’s also unsurprising, when a growing scientific consensus suggests that sugary diets are shaving years off our lives. Two years ago, new government regulations meant that restaurant chains had to introduce calorie counts on menus. Subsequent research has found that almost half of 18-25 year olds (the next generation of pudding eaters) would change their order based on these stats.
Recessionary pressures aren’t helping, either. According to Simon-Kucher research, 60 percent of diners are planning to save money by ordering fewer courses. As Cooper puts it: ‘Adding on a pudding feels a trifle like a luxury you can do without in the current cost-of-living crisis. Why get tiramisu when you could cut £25 off the bill?’
Why get tiramisu when you could cut £25 off the bill?
But talk to chefs, and it quickly becomes apparent that decent, hot puds aren’t inherently a luxury. ‘Anyone who tells you a steamed sponge is expensive to make is taking the piss,’ says Lloyd Morse, chef-owner at Edinburgh’s The Palmerston which serves up a three course set lunch menu for just £21. He reels off a basic list of pudding ingredients – butter, flour, sugar – which are miles cheaper than savoury luxuries such as smoked salmon or beef.
Instead, it’s a question of staffing, capacity, and expertise. ‘A lot of restaurants can’t afford a pastry chef, or they don’t have space in their kitchen to do desserts,’ explains Mercieca. Happy Endings is a response to a gap between diner demand and restaurant capacity, creating high-end desserts wholesaled to London spots like Tonkotsu and Yard Sale: ‘it’s a problem we can solve,’ Mercieca says. Her steamed puddings are likely to be on a menu near you very soon.
And Mercieca isn’t the only pastry chef taking matters into her own hands. Where once, the holy grail of any freshly trained patisserie graduate was a spot at a high-end restaurant, a new generation are creating standalone pud-only businesses. In London, you’ve probably seen the queues outside Borough Market’s inaccurately named Humble Crumble, which gussies up the unglamorous dessert with flourishes such as rose petals or swirls of toasted meringue. But what about the new rice pudding spot Rizz Rice in Greenwich Peninsula? Or fast-growing mini-chain Cake and Custard Factory, which serves up nostalgic school dinner style sponges drenched in the yellow stuff?
Keeping menus sweet and simple is an obvious choice for these pud-centric operations, as staffing and ingredient costs continue to soar. And if you’re brave enough to want your pud as a follow-up to a three-course meal, as tradition (but not gastrointestinal comfort) dictates? You might not find the classics at the most hyped joints, but London’s old guard are there for you, serving up steaming delights such as sticky toffee pudding (Quo Vadis, Soho), golden syrup sponge (Rules, Covent Garden) or even classic, much-derided spotted dick (Sweetings, Mansion House). They probably won’t look as good on TikTok, but as wintry weather and an inhospitable economic climate continue to bite, they really do feel like a hug in a bowl.