Golden Syrup Dumplings

the Australian bush pudding: scone dough dropped in spoonfuls into a simmering syrup of golden syrup, butter, and water, and cooked covered until the dumplings swell and the sauce goes to caramel

Origin: Australia

From the journey of Sugar Cane.

Queensland has grown cane since the eighteen-sixties, and the industry was built on coerced labour: some sixty thousand Pacific Islanders, chiefly from the New Hebrides and the Solomons, were brought to the Queensland fields between 1863 and 1904 under a system of deception and outright kidnapping known as blackbirding, and most of the survivors were deported under the White Australia policy after Federation. Their descendants, the Australian South Sea Islanders, were recognised as a distinct cultural group only in 1994. What that industry produced, beyond raw sugar, was golden syrup, and golden syrup is the defining sweetener of Australian and New Zealand home baking in a way it is nowhere else outside Britain. It goes into ANZAC biscuits, into ginger nuts, into steamed puddings and self-saucing puddings, and into these dumplings, which are as plain a pudding as exists: a scone dough dropped into simmering syrup and covered, so that the tops steam whilst the bottoms poach and the sauce reduces to a thin caramel around them. They belong to the bush kitchen and the camp oven, where they could be made from a handful of flour and a tin off the shelf, and they remain a fixture of the Australian winter and of every country pub dessert menu.

Ingredients

Dumplings

  • 200 g self-raising flour
  • 50 g cold butter, cubed
  • 2 tbsp golden syrup
  • 100 ml cold whole milk
  • 1 pinch fine salt

Syrup

  • 250 ml water
  • 175 g golden syrup
  • 80 g soft brown sugar
  • 60 g butter
  • 1 whole lemon, juiced

To Serve

  • 300 ml pouring cream or vanilla ice cream, to serve

Method

  1. Put all the syrup ingredients into a wide, deep, lidded frying pan or a shallow casserole and bring slowly to a simmer, stirring until the butter has melted and the sugar dissolved.
  2. Meanwhile rub the butter into the flour and salt to fine crumbs, then stir in the 2 tbsp of golden syrup and enough of the milk to bring it together into a soft, sticky dough. Do not knead.
  3. Drop heaped dessertspoons of the dough into the simmering syrup, spacing them well apart. You should have about twelve.
  4. Cover tightly, reduce the heat to low, and simmer without lifting the lid for 20 minutes, until the dumplings are risen, firm to a light touch, and cooked through to the centre.
  5. Take off the lid, spoon some of the syrup over the dumplings, and simmer uncovered for a further 2 to 3 minutes if the sauce needs thickening. Serve hot with cold cream or ice cream.

Notes

Golden syrup is a cane-refinery product and there is no true substitute; light treacle or a cane syrup comes closest, and honey or maple syrup make a pleasant but quite different pudding. If you have no self-raising flour, use plain flour with 2 tsp of baking powder. The dish is very close to the New Zealand and British steamed syrup puddings and to the Scottish and northern English suet dumplings poached in sweet liquor, all of them children of cheap refinery syrup. Some Australian cooks add a teaspoon of ground ginger or the zest of the lemon to the dough, and a few drop the dumplings into a syrup made with half water and half strong black tea, which cuts the sweetness further.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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