Recipe 7 - Date Pudding

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing in a charity shop (a thrift store to you Americans) and stumbled upon this:

Isn't that an awesome logo? There's another version on the back cover.


It's apparently not travelled all that far. Wakefield is in my own county of Yorkshire. God's own country.


I'm not sure exactly how old it is but it's definately post 1933 (the only date mentioned in it, the date the flour passed its test as being of a high enough quality for sale). I'm not sure when it may be from. Clearly it's not from the period during or immediately following the Second World War as rationing would have made baking most of these things impossible. Based on that I'd guess 1950s but it could be pre war I suppose... There's some great language in here:


As you'll see when we get to the recipes it's pretty vague. At this point ovens were solid fuel fired and nobody would know the temperature in there in degrees so cake recipes call for a 'quick oven' for example meaning hot rather than give a number as they do now.


You can tell just by looking at this thing that the recipes are good though. All the staining means it's spent many years on a kitchen countered getting spattered and that's a sign of use. You don't keep on using a recipe book that doesn't turn out yummy results!

I was excited to chose a recipe for a traditional British desert from here and one looked delicious and fit the bill perfectly:

Doesn't that sound delicious?

We'll use 60g of dates, that's round about half a cup. Rather than a cloth we'll use foil and greaseproof paper tied with string to top our pudding for steaming. There's a good how to video on the BBC good food website. They kind of gloss over it in there but you have to put an upside-down saucer in the bottom of the pan to stop the pudding bottom getting burnt.

Although often alone this could be served with custard or a toffee sauce made of cream, sugar and butter but I think we'll try and be a little healthier and not have that. It'll hopefully be great by itself, if not then a small amount of ice cream would be a perfect accompaniment. This pudding contains a total of 1400 calories.

I love dates. I'm really looking forward to this! Surely the 10p the recipe booklet cost was money well spent!