From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
I am intrigued by the international appetite of the curators of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag’s new exhibition. ‘Grand Dessert – The History of the Dessert’ (to give it its English title) promises gastronomy from around the world: Dutch vlaflip, baklava, charlotte russe, alongside a tour, ‘from custard and ice-cream to delicious gateaux’, of the globally familiar. Twenty years ago, I might have had a legitimate grumble that, although Britain has a world-beating record in this very subject, food history wasn’t considered serious enough to bother a museum with. Today, however, many historic kitchens and dining rooms conjure the cook’s world. But an imagined exhibition about the sweet end to dinner in Britain has another stumbling block: what would we even call it? In the very first meeting, marketing and outreach staff would insist on the internationally comprehensible ‘dessert’; the curators might reply that a history of British puddings should use that uniquely British name.
This tension comes from the habit, in Britain, of according status to foods and words. On the whole, French-derived English vocabulary comes from the ruling Norman class and is therefore ‘posh’, while Germanic words were used by the suddenly demoted Anglo-Saxons. ‘Dessert’ is clearly French – coming from desservir: literally to ‘unserve’ or clear the table – ‘pudding’ is probably also French (from boudin) though it might be from the Germanic pud, meaning ‘to swell’. Plum pudding, bread pudding and their savoury cousins – Yorkshire, black, blood, and so on – are the ballast of the yeoman and working classes. ‘Dessert’ was used by socially mobile, class-obsessed Victorians, eager to sound sophisticated and French. After falling out of fashion in the early 20th century, it has more recently rallied to replace its 1950s predecessor, ‘sweet’, which, class commentators such as Nancy Mitford noted, was used by people insecure about their status and therefore anxious about what to say (as well as Americans). The food writer Tom Parker-Bowles, who presumably has no such insecurities, his mother being the Queen, happily uses the doughty, solid ‘pudding’. Some recipes in his delightful book Cooking and the Crown: Royal recipes from Queen Victoria to King Charles III wouldn’t look out of place in The Hague – ‘Fraise à la Chantilly’, ‘Coupes Montreuil’. Others are solidly English: bread-and-butter pudding, fruit fools, treacle tart, none of them aspiring to the status of artwork.
An array of desserts on 18th-century porcelain made in The Hague and 19th-century glassware. Photo: Alice de Groot/Kunstmuseum Den Haag
Although etymology doesn’t help separate the mixture, puddings and desserts themselves have provided us with a more useful taxonomy: colour coding. One of the publicity images for ‘Grand Dessert’ has moulded jelly fantasies in pastel shades of pink, yellow and green; a three-tiered stand of vivid macarons, jewel-like patisserie and marzipan fruits; cakes (sorry, gateaux) with crimson strawberries; and custard, jelly and cream trifles like striped flags. They are definitely desserts.
They reminded me of the colour plates in my mum’s Good Housekeeping recipe book from the 1970s. One of the joys of recreating recipes from Georgian and Victorian cookbooks is to return to this childhood paradise of gaudy, sugary promise. It’s been a fiddly joy to make a ‘hen’s nest’ of white eggs from flummery, or cream-enriched jelly, nestling in lemon-rind straw, and held in transparent jelly; a delicately pink-tinged charlotte russe (made with pounds and pounds of berries, gently stewed and then dripped through muslin in what looked like a crime scene); and an amber-coloured almond hedgehog snuffling on a bed of grass-green jelly.
The aspirational Georgian or Victorian cook had marigolds (sometimes used to boost the yellow in butter), red and purple berries, and spinach for green. Not all food colourings were so benign. Confectioners used an artist’s palette to paint cakes, with lead dyes for red and yellow, mercury sulphide for vermilion, verdigris and other forms of copper for bright green; arsenic gave a nice minty colour.
Wedgwood pudding mould, c. 1840. Private collection. Courtesy Kunstmuseum den Haag
These are certainly not what a Romanian friend is thinking of when she says that ‘English puddings are so brown’. Instead, she’s describing the puddings we usually had in childhood: swarthy bread and butter, sandy crumbles, bronzed fruit pies. My dad had a dreamy schoolboy love of what he called ‘duff’; a jolly Anglicisation of ‘dough’. It means something made from wheat, butter, sugar and fruit and, with the honourable exception of the temptingly scarlet summer pudding, was likely to be the colour of sherry, autumn leaves or parchment.
Tom Parker-Bowles describes his mixture of homely pudding and international dessert recipes as the ‘very essence of […] royal eating’. Many of their subjects also find equal room for apple pie and tarte tatin, cream buns and profiteroles. Our imaginary British exhibition would need to celebrate both pudding and dessert, though perhaps without using those names. If ‘Grand Dessert’ is distinctly European, what could be more British than ‘Buff Duff and Gaudy Gateaux’?
From the November 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.