Let them eat cake crumbs

An acceptable 19th century meal, consisting of breadcrumbs boiled in milk, would certainly cause a stir in some households today. Hennie Fisher explains

WHILE as a meal it will remain an oddity to serve breadcrumbs in milk, those with Afrikaner roots will remember with great joy their Sunday evening “melkkos”, so perhaps this comforting staple appears in many different cultures.

Queen of puddings, though, is a dessert that should not be confused with the aforementioned, even though it is traditionally made with breadcrumbs soaked in milk. Bread as an ingredient in the making of desserts is nothing strange, keeping in mind the very classic bread and butter pudding that has been dollied up by the likes of Jamie Oliver, and nowadays one often finds more luxurious variations made with crois- sant or brioche. The following version of Queen’s Pudding calls not for bread, but rather uses leftover cake — something a modern household may well have on hand — resulting in a pudding that is somewhat richer and sweeter.

This leads us to the question of what a dessert is and what would be considered a pudding. I was always under the impression that dessert implies a more formal type of sweet course, perhaps combining pastry and a filling, served with whipped cream and a separate sauce, whereas pudding would have been something much more homely, a dish cooked in its own sauce and served in a bowl, eaten with a spoon and not on a dessert plate with a spoon and fork.

But it seems the word pudding has far grander origins, and refers rather to the actual dish than the course within a meal. Research indicated that the first pudding recipes that appeared in historical recipe books were in fact food items more similar to our sausage of today. From there the term white and black puddings for meat-based (or savoury) sausages, and it was only after the later part of the 18th century that traditional English puddings no longer referred to dishes that included meat. The word may have evolved from the Latin word Botellus, meaning sausage, from which came the French word boudin and the English word pudding. Apparently haggis explains the link, in that it was this type of preparation cooked in a sausage skin or stomach lining and that included suet and breadcrumbs, which eventually made the switch to sweet preparation and the steaming of puddings in a pudding basin.

Queen of Puddings seems to have equally illustrious and varied origins. A recipe from 1699 for a Monmouth pudding mentions layers of meringue, jam or fruit and bread soaked in milk. Another version is the Manchester pudding that was largely similar, but contained egg yolks and was rumoured to be the original version of what eventually became the Queen’s Pudding of today; following a royal visit to Manchester by Queen Victoria, who so liked the pudding the chef renamed it in her honour. Whatever one believes to be the origin of the name of this dessert, or whatever one’s opinion about what constitutes a dessert versus a pudding, or whether one should be making pudding with bread crumbs or cake crumbs, give this old fashioned favourite a try while our late winter evenings are still nippy.