Aiming for perfection

SUMMER PUDDING

"There is much, much pleasure to be had in honing a dish to perfection. To get to know the little nuances and pitfalls, the tricks and the intimacies of a recipe, and add your own signature if you wish. If this is a search for perfection - and I suppose it is - then we have to work out the crux of it all: the real reason why an idea appeals to us. We need to identify the heart and soul of a dish and get that part of it right." Nigel Slater

I was just going to write about summer pudding. The reason being that tomorrow is my book group break-up party and I know that one of our number will be bringing her summer pudding. We look forward to it every year, because for something that is made from such unappetising ingredients (white bread), it is truly delicious, or as Nigel Slater puts it:

"those bulging, gloriously juicy globes of raspberries and currants held prisoner by slices of bread."

It's an English dish, though the Italians seem to have a version made with savoiardi biscuits - it looked more like a trifle to me. And it's a very curious mix of the frugal and the extravagant, although possibly slightly less extravagant in England than here in Australia where berries of any kind other than strawberries cost the earth - our climate is not up to it really. The frugal part is the bread casing - white bread, though Elizabeth David is very damning of supermarket bread: "On no account use a factory loaf. I did once, in the interests of discovery. The experiment was expensive (a waste of good raspberries), disastrous and conclusive." Nigel Slater is just as damning and a bit more specific. "Soft, 'plastic' bread turns slimy rather than moist. God knows why it turns so nasty - it's like eating a soggy J cloth. No, the bread needs enough body to hold its shape should you decide to turn your dome of fruit out, and the closeness of texture not to turn to pink pap. A well-made white sandwich loaf will work. Dense bread such as sourdough is often too tight to soak up the juice. Brown bread is disgusting in this instance. Come to think of it, brown bread is disgusting in most instances." Felicity Cloake agrees but does suggest that you get the baker to slice your quality bread as the evenness of the slices is important.

Anyway the bread is cheap - well maybe not if you are using quality bread, but the currants and berries are not. For the 'authentic' summer pudding consists of just raspberries and redcurrants in a ratio of 4:1. Redcurrants are very difficult to get hold of here, and raspberries are pricey. Apparently the English nowadays add blackcurrants - also very difficult to get hold of here. I think my book group companion uses strawberries - as did I on the only occasion I attempted this dish. Indeed I might have tried it for Christmas - the extravagance appealed. Why bread? Well apparently this dish was invented back in the late 18th century when health freaks at health spas wanted something less rich than pastry. Hence the bread. It was called hydropathic pudding then - not very tempting is it?

So what is summer pudding? Well basically it's a pudding basin, lined with slices of bread and filled with fruit which has been stewed slightly with some sugar and water. More bread on top, weighted down with a plate on top and put in the fridge overnight. Turn out on to a plate and serve with cream. The juices soak into the bread, making it supremely tasty. When done correctly it's wonderful. When I made it I didn't have enough juice. Some of the bread was still white. It might have been because I sinned and used strawberries - or maybe the bread was wrong.

Felicity Cloake of The Guardian does an analysis of various versions she has found and gives what she thinks is the perfect recipe, adding at the end - "Is this pudding the true taste of summer in Britain or just more proof that we don't really know how to deal with sunshine? Are you a sliced white or a sourdough fan, what fruit do you put in – and will anyone admit to using frozen?"

Here in Australia, I found that we are a bit more pragmatic about the berries. Stephanie Alexander, who I guess is our top 'foodie authority', says, "It is possible to make a good summer pudding using some frozen fruit. It is not, however, possible to make a good summer pudding using all frozen fruit, as the quality of the juice is diminished. Strawberries are not good, and too many blackberries or blackcurrants will result in purple juice rather than rich crimson." And in her recipe she does not include strawberries. I'm guessing that blueberries (another Australian favourite) are also not suitable as I don't see them as being terribly juicy - but maybe I'm wrong because others do use them. Taste.com has all the possible berries, including strawberries - and also uses brioche rather than bread - which one of our English experts thought was not a good idea. delicious had a version that is more autumnal and uses plums and apples in the mix. I saw one that used pears, and even Elizabeth David has a version made with mulberries. Various chefs add extras such as mint, wine, elderflower cordial, rosewater ...

All of which makes summer pudding the perfect candidate in the search for perfection stakes. It is a clear example of a 'classic dish' which seems to be infinitely variable. So - experiment - make it your own. Perhaps start with a classic version and then decide what is the 'crux' of the dish, and fiddle with that until you have perfection.

Try the same approach with other 'classic' dishes. When my children left home I gave them a collection of recipes for their favourite dishes, and I know they have used them. I also know that they have made them their own by doing things slightly differently, even quite differently in one case at least. And remember that perfection is not "textbook perfect here, as in the arrogant and often misguided notion of how something 'should be' ... but in that it will give you as much pleasure as you can possibly get from it." (Nigel Slater) When you have achieved that then,

"You have found and understood the very reason for that dish, that recipe. Now that is what you call cooking."

Personally I think that perfection is elusive - in every facet of our lives - whether it be anything arty, food, or relationships - particularly relationships. Perfection is an ideal and ideals by their very nature are unobtainable I think. We must aim for them though and I do think that Nigel Slater's ideal of working on your favourite dishes is a good one. Not sure that one would ever achieve perfection though - I think you would probably keep changing your mind about what was perfect. And perfection is so subjective anyway - what I might think is the perfect painting is by no means likely to be my husband's idea of perfection, and that goes for just about everything else. But we must keep trying.

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?" Robert Browning

And I am so looking forward to tomorrow's summer pudding. It will be perfect enough for me.