Sticky Toffee Pudding

The Lake District's date sponge under a dark toffee sauce, the fruit softened first with bicarbonate of soda so that it dissolves entirely into the crumb

Origin: Cartmel and Ullswater, Cumbria, England

From the journey of Date.

Sticky toffee pudding is now the most ordered dessert in Britain, and it is barely sixty years old. Francis Coulson served it at Sharrow Bay on the shore of Ullswater from the 1960s and always said the recipe was not his: he had it from a Mrs Martin of Claughton in Lancashire, who was said in turn to have had it from Canadian airmen billeted nearby during the war. The Cartmel Village Shop began making its own version in 1989, sold it in tubs, and put it into every supermarket in the country. All the claims are disputed and none of them is provable. What is not in dispute is the mechanism, and it is unusual enough to be worth stating plainly. The dates are chopped, covered with boiling water, and hit with a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, which raises the pH and breaks down the fruit so completely that it dissolves into the batter. There are no pieces of date in a correctly made sticky toffee pudding. What the fruit leaves behind is colour, moisture, and a deep malty sweetness that reads as caramel rather than as dried fruit, which is why a great many people who dislike dates eat this happily and have no idea what is in it. The other half is the sauce: double cream, dark muscovado, butter, and treacle boiled together until it thickens, poured over hot and often put briefly back under a grill so that the top blisters. The fruit is a Middle Eastern date in an English pudding, and it got here on the Basra trade. Dates reached Britain in bulk from the Gulf through the nineteenth century, sold pressed into an oblong wooden box with a small two-pronged fork on top, and it was that cheap Victorian import, not any medieval luxury, that put dates into everyday British baking.

Ingredients

Sponge

  • 200 g stoned dates, finely chopped
  • 250 ml boiling water
  • 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
  • 85 g unsalted butter, softened
  • 150 g dark muscovado sugar
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 tbsp black treacle
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 175 g self-raising flour
  • 0.25 tsp fine salt

Toffee sauce

  • 300 ml double cream
  • 150 g dark muscovado sugar
  • 75 g unsalted butter
  • 1 tbsp black treacle
  • 0.5 tsp flaky sea salt

Method

  1. Put the chopped dates in a bowl, pour over the boiling water, and stir in the bicarbonate of soda. Leave for twenty minutes, then mash roughly with a fork.
  2. Heat the oven to 180C (fan 160C, gas 4) and butter a 20 cm square tin or eight individual pudding moulds. Line the base of the tin with baking paper.
  3. Beat the softened butter with the dark muscovado sugar until light, then beat in the eggs one at a time, followed by the treacle and the vanilla.
  4. Fold in the flour and salt, then stir in the date mixture, water and all. The batter will be alarmingly loose.
  5. Pour into the tin and bake for thirty-five minutes, or twenty to twenty-five minutes for individual moulds, until risen, dark, and springy, and a skewer comes out with a crumb or two clinging to it.
  6. While it bakes, make the sauce. Put the cream, muscovado, butter, and treacle in a heavy pan and bring slowly to a simmer, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Simmer for three to four minutes until it thickens and darkens, then stir in the sea salt.
  7. Turn out the pudding, or leave it in the tin, prick it all over with a skewer, and pour over a third of the hot sauce so that it soaks in. Slide it under a hot grill for a minute if you want the top to blister.
  8. Cut into squares and serve hot with the remaining sauce poured over and vanilla ice cream or cold pouring cream alongside.

Notes

The dates do not need to be expensive. This is the one recipe in the atlas where a cheap dry cooking date is genuinely preferable, because it is going to be boiled and mashed to nothing anyway. Dark muscovado, not soft brown sugar. The molasses content is doing most of the work in both the sponge and the sauce. The sauce keeps for two weeks in the refrigerator and sets hard; warm it gently to pour. For a steamed version, closer to what Sharrow Bay originally served, fill buttered moulds two thirds full, cover with pleated foil, and steam for forty minutes.

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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