Essence of Stodge

My baking repost last week featured a 'stodgy' pudding.  Stodgy, in our house, denoted something heavy, unrisen and calorie laden - something that would 'stick to your ribs' (my Grandfather's phrase for food that would provide a days worth of fuel), or lie heavily in your stomach and give any ordinary person indigestion.

After leaving home (in NZ) I had, as a second job, for many years, work in a small boutique sort of restaurant.  The boss was not a professional chef and the food was best described as what you might be eating at home if you came from middle class families in countries as diverse as Thailand, Mexico, Lebanon, India, Italy, ....  The boss liked to travel and always built homestays with cooking lessons into her explorations of the world's cuisines. (It was decades before the internet and AirBnB.)

Her restaurant had a blackboard menu which changed with seasons, available fruit and veg etc.

Anyway, one night, a well heeled English gent came in and dined alone.  When he finished his main course, I went out and described what desserts/puddings we had available.  On the menu that week we had 'bread  pudding' (English people will know this one) and we had been having trouble selling it.  Personally I am not surprised.  Any time my mother tried to feed us Bread Pudding as kids we all gave it the thumbs down.  It was absolutely no comparison to her sponge puddings (which I learned later in life go by the name 'clafouti' is homes posher than ours), and it would be no lie to say we hated the stuff.

So when this gent asked me if the bread pudding was stodgy, I stumbled.  What can you say about bread pudding?  I practiced being a politician: "It is everything that a bread pudding is supposed to be.  It is a queen of bread puddings, it ..."  

He cut me short. "If it isn't stodgy I don't want it!"

"In that case," said I, "..it's definitely stodgy.  Absolutely stodgy.  Stodgerific.  It is heavy and dense, and calorific, and I would be surprised if you could find a stodgier bread pudding in the town, the province, possibly the entire country."

"Good, I will have two."

A couple of years later and by then living in England, the topic of English Puddings came up with one of my English (male) colleagues. He loved 'Pudding'  (sweet puddings. There are also meat puddings, and I think, only think, that the word pudding might originally have referred to boiling being the means of cooking them).  His view was that all the best English pudding recipes started with 'take half a pound of suet, a cup of sugar and a raisin'.  (We agreed that modern puddings were perhaps more generous with the raisins....  ) 'sift in a pound of flour.... '

His foundation 'recipe' defines 'stodgy'.  It has stodge built into every atom of its existence.  It is the very essence of stodginess.