Banana Plum Pudding

No Eggs, Butter, Sugar or Happiness

To celebrate my birthday this year it only seemed appropriate that we get together with family, have a nice dinner and round it all off with the recipe of the day from the CWA Pudding Calendar. The pudding scheduled for my birthday didn’t look all that appetising, but I’ve been wrong before, so I stubbornly refused to be persuaded into something else. Friends, I am a fool, and age has only made it worse.

If the typeface in the shot of today’s recipe looks a little different, that’s because it is. My grandfather, who has already fallen victim to the pudding project, gifted me my grandmother’s well-used copy of the calendar to mark the day, because he has a long established habit of giving birthday presents that make me cry happy tears. Note the loose calendar-style binding that they abandoned for the later editions. This copy, along with a liberal sprinkling of handwritten notes, has also been augmented with the supplementary recipes that appear in later editions, and the content seems to be essentially identical to mum’s copy as far as we can tell.

My father and I started out the day with a morning hike that took a few hours longer than planned, which left mum to start the pudding off solo. You can tell that this photo was taken by somebody who spends a bit of time reading recipe magazines and websites, because I have never prepared once in my life posed all of the ingredients for a preparation shot like this. She even managed to make breadcrumbs look good.

I wasn’t there for any of the prep time, but I’m pretty confident that I didn’t miss anything much. Mixing is mixing, after all, even if there’s a little squooshy banana in there to spice things up. Then mum put the makeshift alfoil lid on the pudding basin and left it to boil for an ordinately long time while she went back to fretting that we might have died or injured ourselves somewhere out in the bush.¹

When it came out of the basin, the pudding looked and felt a lot like one of those Christmas puddings that you have to drown in inordinate amount of brandy custard to get down, but with a faint whiff of banana added to the blend². If, like me, you had your doubts about how good a banana and plum pudding without any eggs, butter or sugar³ could taste, let me assure you that those doubts were well founded. Maybe the seven ladies of the CWA that recommended this recipe knew a trick to making a pudding like this not a stodgy, unappealing mess, but if they did I don’t think they chose to share it with the class.

We got the custard (and a bottle of red instead of some brandy) and tried to put a good face on it, but a number of bowls were left unfinished, including both mum’s and mine, and we both finished off the Beef and Mulberry Pies. The texture was rubbery, the taste wasn’t much to write home about at all, and it’s a boiled pudding, so it was never going to be winning any prizes for aesthetics anyways.

Not every recipe in the calendar was going to be a winner, we knew that going in, but perhaps having picked out a few decent ones in a row had insulated us from just low some of the lows can be.

I think I’m going to have to move my birthday.

The numbers so far

• Eggs: 22 (17 separated)

• Sugar: 6 5/12 cup, 10 tbsp

• Butter: 3 3/4 oz, 1/4 cup, 6 tbsp

• Milk: 1 quart, 2 pints, 1 cup

1. We were having a lovely time, thanks for asking.

2. That’s not an improvement.

3. Aside from one egg and two tablespoons of sugar, of course.