A "pudding" for the last of the cold weather

And another by popular request

I've always found it amusing how Brits refer to dessert as "pudding." I recall a dinner years ago at a London restaurant of the late great chef Alastair Little when, after our main courses, our extremely posh waitress asked if we would like a "pudding." My father, a Brit himself and hater of any sort of pretense, started mocking her saying, "Pudding, we would like pudding, I'm not sure we'd like a pudding, do we want a pudding?" I recall the waitress rolling her eyes and walking away. I'm not sure we ended up having dessert that night.

In England, dessert is usually referred to as pudding, and as their repertoire of desserts are often quite pudding-like, it makes sense. There's Eton Mess, Spotted Dick (a steamed pudding with raisins), trifle, steamed puddings of all sorts (the most famous being plum pudding), jam roly-poly, lemon posset, bread pudding, rice pudding, fools, and syllabubs. But perhaps the most famous of them all, and a favorite of the current Princess of Wales, is the beloved sticky toffee pudding.

Interestingly, there’s a theory that the recipe came not from the UK but from Canada! As the story goes, the recipe originated with a Canadian Air Force officer during World War II who asked the manager of the hotel where he was posted to make it while he was in Britain. The dessert was soon picked up by another hotel, and eventually this spicy-sweet dessert spread throughout the country. Others have credited its invention to the Sharrow Bay Country House Hotel in Cumbria, England, which popularized the dessert in the 1970s. And still others say it has Scottish roots, as the Udny Arms Hotel in Newburgh, Aberdeenshire, is also cited as another sticky toffee pudding birthplace.

Even though I am Canadian and my father was English, I did not grow up eating sticky toffee pudding. I think the idea of dates turned me off as a kid, but that said, I don't recall ever seeing it on a Montreal restaurant menu or learning to make it in pastry school (I don’t think my French pastry teachers would have dared). However, once it hit Montreal menus, it was EVERYWHERE—though that's a recent phenomenon.

There was a restaurant in Montreal called Murray's, famous for home-style meals. With 16 locations around Montreal at its peak, Murray's last location (Town of Mount Royal) closed in 2009. I had a question-and-answer column in the Montreal Gazette in the late 90s, and not a month went by without a reader requesting Murray’s recipe for steamed fruit pudding. I think we ran it half a dozen times over the years until the owner of that last location threatened to sue me if I ran it again. "Yeah, right,” I answered as she screamed at me on the phone, “the original owners gave permission for it to be printed in 1994—so there!”

But back to sticky toffee pudding…

I was a latecomer to STP, which reminds me a lot of that delicious Québécois dessert, pouding chômeur. The difference is that pouding chômeur is baked with the sauce on top, whereas with sticky toffee pudding, the sauce is poured over the hot cake once it's baked. You may be thinking, but wait, pouding chômeur is also made with maple syrup. Not so as the original pouding chômeur was made with a brown sugar sauce. Aha! Still they are very different animals, yet the resulting taste and texture aren’t all that different.

The place I really fell in love with sticky toffee pudding was at a fabulous gastropub in Edinburgh called The Scran & Scallie (highly recommended). At the end of the meal, the sommelier served us a selection of Scottish cheeses with a 10-year-old Ardbeg whose peatiness worked especially brilliantly with the salty blue cheese. And then came their Sticky toffee pudding, caramelised pecans & vanilla ice cream which was paired with a Glenfiddich Rich Oak 14 Year single malt (they also pair it with a Bowmore 15yr or an espresso martini). Mind blowing people, mind blowing!

You don't need to get all fancy with the pairings for sticky toffee pudding. It's a simple dessert to make, and make it you should because I have yet to find anyone who doesn't like it. I've also included the recipe for Murray's steamed pudding because, though I have never made it, it seems to have impressed many. And to be perfectly honest, I'm running it again just to bug that lady who threatened to sue if I did.

Murray's may be long gone, but their funny little pudding recipe lives on!

Sticky Toffee Pudding

Makes 9 portions