Wyn Drabble: Fancy names hide simple taste

Wyn Drabble.

A colleague handed me a recipe and said, "You must try this". It was for a rhubarb clafoutis. Now I know that's a peasant dish in its country of origin but the use of the word clafoutis had me thinking about how our tastes and knowledge and use of names have changed. It set me reminiscing about childhood puds.

It's quite possible that people my age ate rhubarb clafoutis in their childhood but it would have gone by a different name, perhaps rhubarb batter pudding.

They wouldn't have called it clafoutis and they wouldn't have fiddled with it as I have done, adding orange zest and cardamom.

Or they might have had their rhubarb conjured into flummery, a gelatine-assisted substance which, at some stage in its preparation, had been whipped to give it a detectable hint of aeration, hence its name.

Flummery was a staple in school boarding houses and the like.

I was once the target of a nocturnal flummery attack. I was in a men's university hostel and two friends at a nearby women's hostel had been served flummery that evening.

They could think of no better use for it than as ammunition so at around the midnight hour I was woken by two intruders hurling flummery at me.

Hard to tell but it could have been gooseberry-flavoured.

I vaguely remember something called chiffon, too, but it might just have been another name for flummery. Or it could have been a less dense version of it. Spanish cream was another contender.

Possibly my first taste of a metaphor came from pudding at a friend's house.

I had been invited to his house for dinner and, when the dessert of stewed apples and custard was served, the friend expressed his hope that it didn't have any fingernails in it. I've always remembered it as a very apt metaphor for those pip surrounds you can encounter.

Not that they did him any harm: He went on to become an All Black.

As a young child I was enchanted by the magic of instant pudding.

The radio ad has never left me: "In the time it took to tell you this, you could have made a Greggs Instant Pudding."

For reasons not yet determined by historians, we also ate tapioca and sago ("frog spawn") as puddings.

They were prepared in much the same way as rice pudding but the little spheres were more gelatinous.

Steamed puddings were a winter delight, especially jam or syrup roly poly.

Plum duff, another from the steamer, was reserved for Christmas and contained actual threepences which could buy a small bag of lollies or break your teeth or both. There was no OSH in those days so it was open slather in the pudding risk department.

Bread and butter pudding was another common one but in those days it was more about using up stale bread and other leftovers.

Today, restaurants occasionally offer posh remakes using brioche or croissants instead of bread and topping it with cute little quenelles of crme fraiche.

I wonder what our forebears would have thought of all the more modern creations: white chocolate semi-freddo served on chocolate "dirt" topped with almond lace shards and dotted with fresh raspberries and surrounded by teensy squirts of chocolate ganache and micro-cubes of raspberry jelly.

Delicious it may well be but it will take a number of decades before we can be nostalgic about it and by then I will be long gone.

Perhaps another time we could reminisce about what used to be in the cake tins but, right now, I must dash - my rhubarb clafoutis is smelling deliciously done.
- Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, musician and public speaker.