Rose Prince - The New English Kitchen - Changing the Way You Shop, Cook and Eat

Simply stew the fruit gently until the juices run and add enough sugar to remove any sourness. Line the pudding basin with slices of day-old white bread, pour in the compote and cover with a ‘lid’ of sliced bread, then a saucer small enough to fit inside the basin. Put a weight on top – a can of tomatoes will do – and leave in the fridge overnight.

Push any leftover compote through a sieve to make a sauce. To turn the pudding out, run a blunt knife between the bread casing and the bowl. Invert a plate on top and turn the basin and plate over. If you have ever got water in your gumboots, you will know the noise a summer pudding makes when it unmoulds. Pour over the sauce to cover any white patches. Serve with crème fraîche.

Frozen English berries, organic or conventionally farmed, are a wonderful source of winter fruit and, unlike exotic fruits, they are free of air freight and fossil fuel issues. I use them to make summer puddings in winter for school packed lunches or simply to cheer everyone up. I find them in supermarkets but also in farm shops in big chest freezers.

Constance Spry again, with a pudding whose flavour has only to be tasted to be loved. I have fed this to everyone and, despite its obvious fudgy stickiness and collapsed appearance, they all say how light it is. Recipe trickery at its best.

Serves 4

120g/4oz butter

120g/4oz demerara sugar

240g/8oz golden syrup

300ml/ 1/ 2pint milk

4 thick slices of bread, crusts removed, cut into fingers

whipped cream, to serve

Heat the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a small pan and boil for 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and keep warm. In a separate pan, heat the milk to boiling point. Put the fingers of bread in a dish and pour over the milk. Lift them out, put them into 4 serving bowls and pour over the sauce – you can dip them in the sauce instead but you will have to work fast. Serve immediately, with whipped cream.

For charlottes, buttered day-old bread is placed on top of the fruit and the pudding is baked. Apples and berries make good charlottes, and it is even possible to make a savoury charlotte with chicory, apple and spices that have been slowly cooked until sweet.

Here is a baked winter version of summer pudding, filled with forced rhubarb and frozen raspberries.

Serves 6

about 8 slices of day-old white bread, crusts removed (reserve

them for breadcrumbs, if you like – see here)

softened unsalted butter

ground cinnamon

700g/1 1/ 2lb forced rhubarb, cut into 2cm/ 3/ 4inch lengths

(see here)

400g/14oz frozen raspberries

golden caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas Mark 6. Butter the bread slices and sprinkle with a little cinnamon. Cut each slice into quarters, then into 8 small triangles.

Put the rhubarb and raspberries into a pan, cover and cook over a low heat until the rhubarb is just soft. Add enough sugar to sweeten to your taste, then pour into a shallow ovenproof dish. Arrange the triangles of bread on top, buttered-side up, working in a fish-scale pattern. Bake the charlotte for about half an hour, until the surface of the bread is golden brown. Remove from the oven and sprinkle caster sugar on top. Serve with fresh custard (see here) or thick double cream.

For the last 15 years it has been easy to buy French-style breads in almost every town. Purists will quibble at their quality, but they have the slight sourness, crust and tearable dough that make French breads so wonderful. Next to arrive has been brioche – and no, it’s not as good as the artisan-style buttery bread whose fragrance pours out of pâtisseries across the Channel, but it’s not bad either. Our local late-night shop always sells brioche loaves wrapped in plastic, which keep for a suspiciously long time. They are too claggy to eat fresh but make terrific emergency puddings.

Serves 4

10 slices of brioche

5 ready-to-eat dried figs, sliced

4 egg yolks

300ml/ 1/ 2pint whole milk

125ml/4fl oz double cream

1 tablespoon golden caster sugar

1/ 2teaspoon vanilla extract

a pinch of grated nutmeg

caster sugar for dusting

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/Gas Mark 5. Toast the brioche slices in a dry frying pan over a medium heat; they burn very easily, so be careful. Cut the slices into triangles and arrange them in overlapping layers in an ovenproof dish, points/corners up. Slot a slice of fig between each one.

Whisk the egg yolks into the milk and add the cream, sugar and vanilla. Put in a saucepan and heat gently, stirring, but do not let it boil. As soon as it thickens slightly, pour it over the brioche and figs and scatter a pinch of nutmeg on to the surface. Bake the pudding for 20–30 minutes, until golden on top and just set. Dust with caster sugar and serve with cream.

Flour made from wheat is clearly the most versatile, and the keeping qualities gluten gives to bread are a real advantage, as the previous recipes show. But there are alternative flours made from vegetables and nuts that are well worth discovering. Finding a bag of gram flour in an Asian shop in Tooting Bec was the beginning of a new friendship with flour in savoury cooking for me, and my favourite recipe for orange cake would be no good without potato flour.

Gram flour is milled from dried chick peas and is a light, gentle-flavoured flour with a smooth texture. It is used extensively in Indian cooking, in fritters or to coat vegetables for frying.

A practical way to season poultry and game or whole fish like sole and trout before you fry it. Quicker than breadcrumbing, it also absorbs the sometimes unpleasant fat on poultry skin that spits as it cooks.

gram flour

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons dried oregano

freshly ground black pepper

Scatter gram flour on to a dinner plate in a layer 5 mm/ 1/ 4inch deep. Mix in the salt and oregano and grind over some black pepper. Roll the meat or fish in the mixture and cook.

Makes 12–16 (enough to serve 4 people with drinks)

90g/3oz gram flour, sifted

75g/2 1/ 2oz very mature farmhouse Cheddar cheese, roughly grated

75g/2 1/ 2oz chilled unsalted butter, cut into cubes

a large pinch of cayenne pepper

1/ 2teaspoon sea salt

a pinch of freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon very cold water

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/Gas Mark 5. Put the flour, cheese, butter, cayenne and seasoning into a food processor and whiz until the mixture has a breadcrumb consistency. Add the water and whiz again. As soon as the crumbs begin to form a dough, tip them on to a board and knead together until smooth. Work quickly; the mixture should not become greasy.

Shape the dough into a cylinder and cut it into 1cm thick slices. Put them 2cm/ 3/ 4inch apart on a baking sheet lined with baking parchment or greaseproof paper. Place in the fridge for 20 minutes, then bake for 15 minutes, until the shortbreads are slightly puffed, their edges lightly brown.

To decorate and add flavour, roll the cylinder of dough in chopped pistachio nuts, or scatter toasted black cumin seeds or flaked almonds on to the sliced biscuits before baking.

In Italy, potato flour is added to sweet cakes with ground nuts, giving them an almost impossible lightness and delicious dry crumb. It is also used to coat pork before frying. Also known as fécule , potato flour is available from Italian stores and wholefood shops. It is very white, and squeaks when rubbed between your fingers.