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Summer Pudding

Summer Pudding

In praise of exciting fruit

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Claire Ptak
Jul 13, 2024
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Summer Pudding
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A Summer Pudding is a quintessential British dessert. Piles of the best fruit available only at the height of summer are just cooked to release their juices but maintain their fresh flavour, then chilled overnight wrapped in stale white bread. Served cold, and with fresh cream, it’s a balm to the few stifling days we get each year.

It’s one of my most enduring fascinations; there’s a recipe for a more authentic Summer Pudding in The Violet Bakery Cookbook, and in Love Is a Pink Cake there are recipes for brioche buns with summer pudding and geranium, and for a summer pudding sundae. At the bakery we make it into a buttercream each year, sans bread, for our seasonal offering using unbelievable fruit from Fern Verrow farm in Herefordshire, and last summer we sandwiched the fruit with clotted cream in our scones. We’re not doing that this year, instead we’re making a dark rye cake studded with stone fruit and berries, so I thought I’d share that recipe below.

Jostaberries at Fern Verrow, Jane & me
Photos by Pia Riverola

What fruit you use is largely up to you; as with most traditional recipes there’s so many variations. Redcurrants are the classic mainstay both for their flavour and their colour, but in recent years I’ve moved away from them for other combinations. Currants are a must though, and I love the softer, sweeter, slightly more floral white, with colour and tartness provided by blackcurrants and jostaberries.

I’d never eaten a blackcurrant till I came to the UK, as they were banned in the US until 1966 – kinda like Alphonso Mangoes, what’s with that? – so they’re not very popular there. I think cassis might have been floating about in the ‘80s, but I wasn’t drinking it as a kid. Now I love them, and their offspring the jostaberry. This incredible hybrid fruit is a complex cross of the north American coastal gooseberry, the European gooseberry, and the blackcurrant, I’ve only ever seen these at Fern Verrow, and later at Heckfield Place, both times grown by Jane Scotter, but a quick google tells me you can now buy plants to grow at home.

Visiting Heckfield Place with my team

I first met Jane when I arrived in London, when she was selling her produce at Spa Terminus, and I could pinch myself that we still get produce from her all these years later. In the intervening years I’ve had the pleasure of styling her book, Fern Verrow: Recipes from the Farm Kitchen, and I’ve visited her both at the farm and at Heckfield, where she grows produce specifically for Sky Gingell’s Spring. She opened my eyes to some incredible fruit, the jostaberry among them, and so I talk about them not as an inflexible instruction to use them, but rather an example of what you could discover by connecting with growers near you.  

Apologies for the tangent, but in conclusion; use a jostaberry if you can, if you can’t a blackcurrant is a perfect alternative, perhaps buoyed out by gooseberries for added tartness. When making substitutions, use the weights below as a guide, bearing in mind how much juice each fruit will yield. You’ll note in the recipe below that the raspberries are added once the pan is off the heat, otherwise they will disintegrate.

Lastly, I use raspberries and loganberries to round out the flavour, and include a few leaves of rose geranium to lift everything up. I’ve seen recipes though that call for strawberries and blackberries, or in the case of one recipe by Alison Roman, peaches. What you want is that bright fresh flavour and the incredible pink-purple colour; the essence of summer.

Summer fruits
Photos by Pia Riverola

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