Malva Pudding

A warm, sweet sauce is soaked into the baked batter. South Africa’s malva pudding is a soft dessert of baked batter generously soaked with sauce. A well-known method mixes apricot jam into the batter, and it is divided into portions and served warm with cream, custard, ice cream or the like. Here, pudding does not mean Japanese purin, which is chilled until set, but a dessert eaten after a meal.

The milk used in the batter and the sauce

Flour, sugar, eggs, butter, milk and other ingredients are used, and the jam is added into the batter rather than on top. Some methods use vinegar and bicarbonate of soda, and the way of mixing is not uniform. In the recipe (ingredient proportions and method) by cook Warren Mendes, eggs, melted and cooled butter, jam, vinegar and evaporated milk are added to flour, bicarbonate of soda and fine white sugar and combined with a whisk. There is no step of creaming the butter with sugar or of whisking the yolks and whites separately.

One 375-milliliter can of evaporated milk, an unsweetened concentrated milk, is used: 150 milliliters in the batter and 225 milliliters in the sauce. The sauce also uses brown sugar, cream, butter and water, and the milk and fat soaked in after baking are also ingredients that shape the flavor and texture of the whole dessert.

Baking through to the center, then soaking in warm sauce

For the sauce to be absorbed, the pudding must first be baked through to the center. In Maggie Pepler’s recipe, a heatproof glass or ceramic dish is covered with greased aluminum foil and baked. Michael Olivier, who passed on the recipe, explains that if it is underbaked, it will not absorb the sauce and the inside will be heavy.

A sauce of butter, sugar and other ingredients is kept warm and poured over the hot cake. Making holes in the cake helps the sauce penetrate inside. In South African Tourism’s recipe, a sauce of boiling water, brown sugar, vanilla and concentrated milk is added in several portions over a few minutes, waiting for the sauce already poured to soak in. The sauce does not merely decorate the surface but moistens the cake all the way through.

Pepler’s sauce uses ordinary milk, cream, sugar, water and butter, while Mendes’s sauce uses evaporated milk. South African Tourism gives a sauce with neither butter nor cream, and the apricot jam in its batter is optional. In this way, the use of jam and dairy products varies from recipe to recipe.

A household recipe that spread through a restaurant in the 1970s

Handed down as a warm dessert of the Cape Dutch tradition, malva pudding also became popular in restaurants in the late 1970s. Olivier, who was in charge of the restaurant at Boschendal, recalls that in the late 1970s, while the head chef was away, he asked his friend Pepler for help and learned how to make it from her. After that, it became a fixture on the buffet.

Pepler said she had learned how to make it from her mother. A 2013 obituary preserves a recollection that farm women read recipes to one another over shared party-line telephones, which is why it was called “telephone pudding.” A method that had been passed between households was brought into a restaurant and came to be shared with customers who wanted to know how to make it.

The recipe Olivier published in 2013 was also the one he had received from Pepler. Later, versions adding bananas, apples or caramelized condensed milk also became more common. In addition to the recipe handed down from home kitchens to restaurants, methods using new ingredients have also spread.

A pudding recorded in early 20th-century cookbooks

The name malva pudding also appears in a 1912 book by Mrs. P. W. de Klerk and in its 1924 Afrikaans edition. These were researched by cookbook scholar Hetta van Deventer and introduced by food journalist Errieda du Toit. However, they had no apricot jam, no alcohol and no step of soaking the hot baked cake with sauce; the sauce was served separately. Despite the same name, it was a different dessert from the malva pudding widely known today, in which the baked cake is soaked with sauce.

The alternative name telephone pudding is likewise not a name that appears only in the recollection of recipes being passed on by phone. Cook Jeanne Horak notes that the 1918 edition of Mrs. D. J. H.’s “Oranje Kook-, Koek- en Resepteboek,” which she owns, contains a recipe using ginger and apricot jam. Whether its proportions were the same as the Pepler family’s recipe is unknown, but warm desserts containing jam were also handed down under names other than malva pudding.

Competing theories on the origin of the name

Explanations of Malva are also divided among theories that link its texture to malvalekker, the Afrikaans word for marshmallow, and theories that connect it to the sweet wine malvesy or to the fragrant leaves of rose geranium. Food historian Hettie Claassens rejects the wine theory and focuses on the fragrant leaves used as a substitute for rose water. Meanwhile, cookbook author Dine van Zyl connects the name with a sauce made with wine. The 1912 and 1924 recipes of the same name include neither wine nor scented leaves. Opinions remain divided over where the name comes from.

How it differs from Jan Ellis and Cape brandy puddings

Jan Ellis pudding is a closely related dessert in which a batter of jam, milk, vinegar and bicarbonate of soda is soaked with a sauce of butter, sugar, water and cream. There is also an outdoor method in which it is baked in a lidded cast-iron pot set over charcoal, with charcoal later placed on the lid as well to add heat from above.

Cape brandy pudding has chopped dates and pieces of walnut in the batter. Part of the dates are softened with bicarbonate of soda and boiling water, the remaining fruit and the nuts are mixed in and the batter is baked, and a syrup is brought to a boil, with brandy added after the heat is turned off. Unlike the smooth malva with jam mixed in, it offers the texture of pieces of fruit and walnut along with the aroma of brandy.

A dessert also shared after a braai

Malva is not a dessert only for the cold season. Mendes also presents an example of serving it after a braai, an outdoor cookout. The cake, baked in a large ovenproof dish and soaked with sauce, is shared among many people. Adding cold ice cream to the warm cake also brings an enjoyable contrast in temperature.

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