Endangered puddings
The best way to (not) watch The Great British Baking Show
Do you want a hardcover book for a paperback price? APOCALYPSE is half-off on Amazon until Wednesday! And while you’re there, don’t forget to leave a review—it really does help!
One of my most annoying American tendencies is to assume that I have an innate understanding of all other English-speaking cultures. This is one of the few lies of American exceptionalism that expat life does nothing to dislodge; in fact, it amplifies it, because any form of English can lull me into comfort and familiarity.
So it’s bracing to be reminded that British culture has features that are completely incomprehensible to me. Namely, their questionably appetizing desserts. Yes, it is Great British Baking Show season again, which I consume exclusively through Brian Moylan’s recaps for Vulture. The Channel 4/Netflix seasons aren’t available in Mexico (and everyone involved in the “guaky molo” monstrosity of 2022 should be grateful they aren’t), so I’ve only seen the BBC version with Mel, Sue, and Mary Berry. Any restriction I can pass off as snobbery is fine by me, and I can’t imagine enjoying actually watching the likes of Paul Hollywood and Noel Fielding more than I enjoy reading Moylan’s writing about them.
Crucially, Moylan is an American living in the U.K., so he shares my bafflement over such concepts as “flapjacks” (no, not that kind) and “Sussex pond pudding,” but he’s also eaten them, an experience that doesn’t make them any less baffling. About Sussex pond pudding, an animal fat-based pastry (sure?) wrapped around a whole lemon (?!?!?), he writes:
It is, if not the ideal challenge, then the ideal challenge for my mood. Take me to a British lemon bog, I say! Make me a preindustrial mutton-fat pudding with an entire rindy lemon in the middle of it! I already live in the reality of rainbow Insta-bagels, and it is stressful and exhausting and nobody is totally sure if the current president will vacate office and all I want is to watch British bakers earnestly attempt to steam some 17th-century puds.
To be fair to British people, apparently none of them know what (or why) Sussex pond pudding is either. Capitalist globalization has at last come for its pioneering perpetrators, and The Guardian reports that many traditional British desserts are going extinct. “Puddings were once a luxury for the well-off but as sugar became more widely available, more people could enjoy them.” (And why, pray tell, did sugar become more widely available? HMMMM?????) But now people (read: women) prioritize convenience and having jobs over spending hours a day steaming puddings.
To properly assess the level of impending tragedy here, another U.K.-residing American stepped up to see what, if anything, will be missed once a British mum steams the last homemade spotted dick. Tim Dowling made ten of the endangered puddings, including the jam roly-poly a.k.a. “dead-man’s arm” (the photo explains why), several variations on the theme of “old bread,” and Mary Berry’s own Sussex pond pudding, the description of which introduced me to the nauseating phrase “pudding basin.” “My family ate this without complaint,” counts as high praise here—and there is some. As a representative of the culture that inherited and perfected capitalist globalization, I think the next step is clear: Make Dowling the host of a British version of Nailed It! And get Moylan to write the recaps.
