My failure to distinguish between toffee, caramel and butterscotch sauces and their candy equivalents in an earlier post got me into some well-deserved hot water (syrup?). I confess it had never really occurred to me before, not being much of a confectioner, but caramel sauce is not necessarily just melted or diluted caramel. Indeed, chewy caramel candies are made by cooking caramel to the firm ball stage (248F). Caramel sauce is made by cooking sugar until it practically burns (300 – 330F or even more if you like it smoky!).

…settling in again is about as time consuming as vacationing. I returned yesterday to 134 questions in my in-box, many of them true head scratchers requiring detailed replies. I’m about half way through…then there’s my regular mortgage- and tuition-paying job to catch up on. Such an inconvenience! I’ll do my best to get my puddings […]

By 1975, rock music had become a parody of itself. The Beatles were split up, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison were dead. A lot of the great bands from the 60’s were still playing (The Who, the Stones, The Band and the Grateful Dead spring to mind) but most of the vitality was gone from the form. Popular culture had moved on to disco and lite rock acts like Seals & Crofts and England Dan & John Ford Coley. Little kids like my sister and me were listening to the Partridge Family, the Bay City Rollers, Wings and Leif Garrett. Concert goers were thrilling to the theatrics of KISS. Intellectual types were swooning to pompous art rock bands like Spirit, Yes, Genesis, King Crimson, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Some of it was fun, a little of it was artistic, none of it was rock n’ roll.

One thing pretty much everyone agreed upon back in the early days of puddings was that they were a very good idea. Organs, blood and grain all stuffed into a bladder and boiled? What’s not to love? Yet the big problem for pudding lovers of the period was that puddings were prisoners of seasonality. I mean let’s face it, the average person didn’t have fresh blood, guts and bladders lying around everywhere all the time. On the farm animals were only slaughtered in cool weather to prevent spoilage (refrigerators being in very short supply in the first few millennia before Christ). Thus at the dawn of the Age of Pudding, it would have only been a once-in-a-while treat.

The word “pudding”, it’s thought, comes down to us from the Latin word botellus which basically means “sausage.” Boudin is how the word occurs now in French. Pudim is the Portuguese version, pudín the Spanish. Sounding a little familiar now? Thought so. But did spotted dick and sticky toffee pudding really start out as sausage? Yes. Sort of. Here it helps to take a brief — and very general — look at early days of sausage making.

Excellent question, reader Josh! Toffee sauce is similar to caramel sauce in the sense that it’s made from sugar, butter and/or cream, the main difference is the degree to which it’s cooked. Toffee is only cooked to the point that the sugar in it melts, at which point it becomes usable. Caramel is cooked well […]

Reader Helen writes with a very interesting problem:

I’ve had a pastry cream disaster that remains a mystery to me. I’ve been making it with no problems for a long time. Just made 4 batches 2 weeks ago. Today, I tried it 3 times and every time it curdled as soon as it came to a simmer. I’ve never had this problem before and usually simmer it for 1-2 minutes to make sure to kill the enzyme in the yolks that thins out the starch as the cream sits. The only thing I did differently today was use all new ingredients (milk, cream, and eggs). I tasted milk and cream and they didn’t taste spoiled. I noticed that my corn starch expired 2 years ago, but it worked fine 2 weeks ago, so I can’t imagine it went bad all of a sudden. Here is my recipe and procedure: http://www.beyondsalmon.com/2014/07/pastry-cream.html

READ ON

I don’t often do “plated” desserts, so this will be fun. It’s kind of fun to play with sauces and squeeze bottles every so often, no? This recipe is adapted from Delia Smith’s Christmas, but why not serve it in July? I can’t think of a reason!

2 cups chopped pitted dates
3/4 boiling water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons instant espresso
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
3 ounces (6 tablespoons) butter
4.5 ounces (2/3 cup) sugar
2 eggs at room temperature
6.25 ounces (1 1/4 cups) flour, sifted
1 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 recipe the toffee sauce
1/2 recipe créme Anglaise or melted vanilla ice cream or lightly sweetened cream
walnuts for garnish

I do love a good British pudding, and if I can serve it with two sauces, so much the better. Like strawberries Romanoff this is a classic that rarely sees the light of day nowadays. It’s time to turn things around.