Sticky Toffee Pudding

A warm date cake is soaked with a rich sauce of dairy and sugar, and more sauce is poured over it on the plate. Sticky toffee pudding is a British dessert in which fruit is blended into the batter. Unlike a custard pudding that is chilled until set, it is a warm, soft cake finished with sauce. Its history brings together a home cookbook, a restaurant’s reputation and a village’s take-home product, and the names of several establishments and cooks appear in it.

Tea or boiling water: blending dates into the batter

Among methods that soften dates in tea, one example soaks pitted, chopped dates in strong hot tea and turns the softened mixture into a paste. Rather than being scattered through as large pieces, the fruit goes into the batter together with its soaking liquid, so it blends into the fine brown crumb. Dates not only add sweetness but also blend into the batter, soft flesh and all.

That batter is made by mixing butter and sugar, combining eggs, flour and a leavening agent, then adding the dates and baking. The toffee sauce is made separately by heating butter, brown sugar and rich cream. Because the process involves dissolving the sugar and then simmering, simply sprinkling sugar on the baked surface will not produce the same texture.

In a method that adds molasses and softens the dates in hot water, molasses is added to the brown sugar in the batter, and the fruit is puréed with hot water and mixed in later. Baking powder goes into the fat mixture and baking soda into the fruit-and-water purée, so the two leavening agents are combined at different stages. The batter is divided into a fat-based portion and a fruit portion with a high moisture content, and the two portions are combined at the end.

There is also a method of slowly steaming the batter in a mold set in a pot. The dates are softened in hot water, combined with butter, eggs, flour and nuts, packed into a pudding mold and steamed. This is a home example in which the pudding is turned out of the mold and topped with sauce.

Sauce soaked into the cake and sauce poured on top

When part of the sauce is soaked into the baked cake and the rest is served at the table, the sauce absorbed inside and the sauce left on the surface can be enjoyed together. There is also a method of poking holes and pouring in sauce so that the liquid reaches the interior. The way of eating it has been handed down: a baked cake containing dates combined with a separately made sauce of dairy and sugar, served warm.

For a sauce that begins with caramel, sugar, butter and salt are heated to a deep amber before cream is poured in, and the sauce is simmered until thick enough to coat a spoon. Unlike the method of simmering brown sugar and cream together from the start, the heating that develops color comes before the dairy is added.

Warm cake and cold ice cream

Adding ice cream or cream brings contrasts in temperature and richness. Unlike a baked good handed over wrapped in paper, this dessert is complete only when it is plated and the sauce is poured over it. Even as you eat, the temperature and the way the sauce soaks in keep changing.

In versions baked in individual ovenproof cups, there is no large cake to cut; each pudding is cooled in its container, turned out and topped with sauce. King Arthur also introduces a version that uses figs instead of dates. The dessert is not limited to a large date cake; it is also made with other fruits or in other baking containers.

Mrs Martin’s formula in a cookbook and the Sharrow Bay refinement

British cook Simon Hopkinson recalls that he learned of the recipe (the proportions of ingredients and the method) of Mrs Martin, who ran the Old Rectory in Claughton, Lancashire, from The Good Food Guide Dinner Party Book, published in 1971. In that recipe, the dates are softened in boiling water, and baking soda is added before they are used in the batter. A sauce of brown sugar, butter and cream is poured over the baked cake. His account of making it at his own restaurant in 1975 also shows one route by which the dessert passed from a home cookbook to a restaurant.

Sharrow Bay Hotel in the Lake District was another place that spread the dessert’s reputation in the 1970s. The chef at Sharrow Bay was Francis Coulson. In Hopkinson’s comparison, Coulson’s batter used more eggs and less flour than Mrs Martin’s recipe, and the sauce in particular was different. It greatly increased the dairy cream and used demerara sugar and black treacle. The depth of the treacle and the generous amount of dairy were refinements that gave the sauce a distinctive richness as well.

Two stories of a recipe passed on by a Canadian friend or airman

A connection with Canada is also told. Cubitt House, a present-day pub company, relates a story that Coulson’s business partner Brian Sack received a handwritten recipe from a Canadian airman he met in the air force during the war, and that it contained maple syrup. The company also links this story to the similarity with Quebec’s pouding chômeur.

Meanwhile, Hopkinson writes that he heard about a “Canadian friend” from Mrs Martin’s son. Both Mrs Martin’s dessert, which spread through a cookbook, and the hotel’s history are accompanied by stories of a cook from across the ocean.

Carried from Cartmel to the home table

Cartmel Village Shop in Cumbria relates in its own history that it began baking the pudding in the kitchen behind the shop and selling it at the counter in front. Even after orders grew and the kitchen moved, it continued making the pudding by hand in small batches and expanded its sales to farm shops and grocers. This is an example of the dessert becoming established not only as a restaurant dish but also as a product to take home.

The shop offers sizes ranging from individual portions to puddings for a family to share. Not being fixed to a single form is also a characteristic of this dessert. Whether the dates are softened in tea or in hot water, whether it is cut from a square pan or baked in small portions, and whether the sauce is soaked in or served separately all change how a warm pudding of the same name turns out.

Glossary