Dienstag, 7. Oktober 2014

Yorkshire goes pudding

Having exported loads of beautiful girls as well as the occasional handsome boy, the Yorkshire Empire is now considering to go more global. In fact, the Yorkshire Pudding has already proved its potential as an attractive side dish for the main dish and is now expected to go to the European continent. Unfortunately, London has already rejected the application to hold a Pudding Referendum about this and does - for the time being - not want beautiful Yorkshire to become even more famous for its puddings.


Whereas the word "pudding" seems to have been widely introduced in the rest of the world as a roundish, sweet, tooth rotting wobble thing, people in Yorkshire call everything a pudding that looks like what the French would call "un dessert". The Spanish know that as "postres" and the Germans as "Nachtisch". The latter should not get confounded with "Nachttisch" which simply means bed table and does not make any child rhapsodize. And in the United Kingdom pudding may mean everything that comes after. But in Yorkshire you have a choice: what do you have for tea? possibly pudding or so. If you get served a Yorkshire pudding however, it means that you are in the middle of a main course, with meet, vegetable or so.


In the Black Forest, where a well known speciality is the Badische Schneckensuppe, a regional snail soup, highly sophisticated, as it seems, and appreciated not only by Napoleon but also by people from Yorkshire, we do not understand these delicate nuances. As long as we lived there, Cathie could surprise me with some Y.P. and I often felt that there should rather be some sweetie inside instead of pretending to be a cake that looked like a brownish bowl containing something else. On the other hand, it became very obvious that a somehow combination of the charm of this soup with the elegance of the Yorkshire pudding would revolutionize the gastronomic world. And this in spite of the fact that our gastro-world-champion France is constantly watching us and waiting for mistakes we could make. I want a referendum about a joint venture between Baden and Yorkshire.


If one thinks that the word pudding comes originally from England may get it all wrong. Yes, the French also claim the originality for this: Boudin is a black pudding that may have wandered to UK, together with entrecote, escalope and dessert. Pudding is mentioned in the English world only in 1305, had however a totally unclear meaning. Vienna, where Cath and I live now, has an additional etymological solution for our problem: Serviettenknödel a member of the wide family of knödels called Klöße in the North of Germany. Pudding as an English import appears in the German kingdoms in 1701 as Poding. These are the facts, as the tabloid press would present them probably.

Vienna which has always been a melting pot for great chefs from central European countries has made a major contribution to the pudding business: In 1864 the worlds biggest pudding ever was here presented. 630 kilograms of pudding contained 300 kg of raisin. 125 kg of sugar and 4500 eggs also went into this monster. The very special contribution to this giant pudding were however the 10 bottles of rum that made this delicacy slightly tipsy. Needless to add that the cooking of it all took 5 full days and nights. What a pudding! Sigmund Freud would not have left this without major analysis.

To come back to Yorkshire: the wedding we attended was great. Sue's Yorkshire pudding we enjoyed much. Richard's smile. To see them all again, one day, Margaret, Lewis, Rob and Kate, and all the others will be something we look already forward. Thank you Yorkshire.







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