The Great Gastropod Pudding Off (encore)

Speaker 1 Hello to all you Gastropod listeners, old and new.

Speaker 2 We're nearing the end of the summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, and many folks are going on their last vacation of the season or heading home from one.

Speaker 7 We hope you've all found some respite from the world out there.

Speaker 9 We are indulging in a little respite ourselves this week and traveling to see family that we haven't seen since COVID began.

Speaker 9 And alongside that, we thought it was time for a little comfort food too, specifically pudding.

Speaker 8 This episode, which we called the Great Gastropod Pudding Off, is one of our all-time favorites.

Speaker 3 If you haven't heard it yet, you're in for a treat.

Speaker 4 And if you've already heard it, I am sure you're going to want to settle in and enjoy it again.

Speaker 2 I mean, who doesn't want to listen to Tom, Selesi, and Yan?

Speaker 9 Talking about Spotted Dick, I'm in. Hopefully, this will tide us all over until we're back in the tent for the new season of Bake Off next month.

Speaker 17 I'm Tom.

Speaker 18 I'm from the Great British Bake Off once upon a time, many years ago.

Speaker 15 What year?

Speaker 18 What year? 2016, I think. Which was the last one that was on the BBC.

Speaker 19 My name's Selassie. I'm making Spotted Dick and I was on 2016 Bake Off.

Speaker 20 My name's Jan.

Speaker 12 What year are you at?

Speaker 20 So the UK, I believe it's Series 8,

Speaker 20 and in the US, I believe it's Series 5.

Speaker 20 So, see, I'm blushing already. This is why his face made up for radio.

Speaker 9 Oh my god, Tom Selassie!

Speaker 12 Yeah!

Speaker 12 It was really hard not to fangirl excessively.

Speaker 9 I was like a schoolgirl meeting the Beatles. It was overwhelming.

Speaker 23 Yes, we are huge fans of the Great British Bake Off here at Gastropod.

Speaker 9 And so imagine our delight, and by delight, I mean sheer unadulterated ecstasy when three of our favorite bake-off stars agreed to take part in the first ever great gastropod put-off.

Speaker 24 That put, if it's not totally obvious, it's short for pudding.

Speaker 2 And we right now are freaking out so much we haven't introduced ourselves.

Speaker 9 Or even told you what you're listening to, which is Gastropod, the podcast, or should I say pud cut?

Speaker 22 Oh my god, that's bad. No, you shouldn't.

Speaker 9 Okay, the podcast that's full of pudding puns and also looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Nicola Twilley.

Speaker 28 And I'm Cynthia Graber.

Speaker 1 And a quick word to those of you who listen with your kids, our baking contestants all will be making a version of the classic British pudding, Spotted Dick.

Speaker 13 And you can see where this is going.

Speaker 2 This episode is filled with junior high-level anatomy jokes and a couple of mild curse words, so you've been warned.

Speaker 9 This episode all began with Cynthia's great passion for a very particular pudding, sticky toffee pudding.

Speaker 8 I fell in love with sticky toffee pudding a few years ago once I realized it wasn't, you know, American-style butterscotch pudding.

Speaker 33 And then I asked my partner Tim to make it for me for my birthday this year.

Speaker 9 And Tim texted me because I'm British and sticky toffee pudding is a very British pudding. Or so I thought.

Speaker 28 In any case, you sent him the perfect recipe.

Speaker 22 He made the batter, he put it in the pan, and then he freaked out.

Speaker 32 It looked nothing like any cake batter he knew.

Speaker 34 He was so worried it would fail that he literally ran out to the store to get new supplies for a second batch.

Speaker 36 But we did put it in the oven, and by the time he came back, we could tell it was the real deal.

Speaker 9 Would I have failed you? You guys really need to trust me when it comes to pudding.

Speaker 8 But this led me to all sorts of questions.

Speaker 37 Of course, I wanted to know where did sticky toffee pudding come from, but then I had a more basic question.

Speaker 5 What is pudding?

Speaker 1 Is it any type of dessert like the pudding course you see at restaurants?

Speaker 9 Yes, and also no.

Speaker 9 And even though I am something of a pudding expert, being British, pudding is basically my birthright. But even so, I found that I too had pudding questions.

Speaker 9 Like, spotted dick, why would you call a pudding a dick? Or a duff? Or a dead man's arm? And quickly, I realized this is all all the excuse we need to make a pudding episode.

Speaker 13 Hooray!

Speaker 32 I seconded that immediately, of course.

Speaker 9 And then, because when it comes to pudding, I believe in going big or going home, I thought, you know, we have some great British bake-off bakers in our fan club, particularly the fabulous Tom Gillifford, and maybe they'd want to compete to make us some pudding, particularly some spotted dick.

Speaker 38 And to our great shock and unending delight and excitement, they did.

Speaker 9 So we had a put off, and there was a winner, and we're going to tell you all about it

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Speaker 1 Okay, so this is is the first trial of the first attempt at a spotted dick.

Speaker 41 This is a Yankee spotted dick, even better.

Speaker 3 So this is our cornmeal and New England cranberry-based dick.

Speaker 30 No, my partner Tim is not a former bake-off contestant.

Speaker 8 Here's what happened.

Speaker 29 Once Nikki and I realized that the wonderful Tom Gilliford of the Great British Bake Off had indeed gathered two of his bake-off friends to compete on Gastropod, then I had a problem.

Speaker 5 Tim either had to come with us to

Speaker 9 So we threw a rookie into the mix. Four bakers, Yan, Tom, and Selassie from the Bake Off, Tim from Casa Gastropod.
One evening, and one challenge to create a spotted dick with a twist.

Speaker 9 Well, a mini dick, actually. Tom kindly pointed out that a full-size dick would take too long, so to speak.

Speaker 22 It begins.

Speaker 23 Spotted dick traditionally is a steamed pudding with raisins or currants in it.

Speaker 1 It's typically served with custard poured over top.

Speaker 8 But back in our home in Boston, Tim invented his own spotted dick recipe for the competition, a Yankee dick, and we gave his very first bake of it a try.

Speaker 17 Mmm, mmm.

Speaker 17 Hmm. Okay.

Speaker 41 So I think it's a little too sweet because the cranberries are very sweet.

Speaker 7 They're sweet. And

Speaker 34 just the dough it, like the

Speaker 1 pudding part itself is pretty sweet.

Speaker 7 And you're going to put a custard on it, and so I agree it needs to be a little less sweet.

Speaker 41 But the cornmeal has a really nice, crunchy texture.

Speaker 5 So, I have to say, neither of us have ever had spotted dick before, so we actually don't know how this compares.

Speaker 41 This is the best spotted dick I've ever had.

Speaker 8 There were a few more bakes to get the recipe just right.

Speaker 8 Then Tim packed up his cornmeal, cranberries, rum, maple syrup, measuring cups, and whisk and zester, and he got on an overnight flight to meet us in London.

Speaker 9 Other bakers have brought other things, like whiskey, a bottle of scotch,

Speaker 9 not any old scotch either.

Speaker 18 Lafroy, 10-year-old LaFroy, gotta be.

Speaker 18 And then because you're gonna have a drink with it, this is not in going in the pudding, it's just going next to it, which is some LaFroy infused with apricots, which is fun.

Speaker 18 And then my knife roll, which doesn't have any knives in it today, just has like cling film and

Speaker 18 an orangutan-shaped potato peeler. That's amazing.
And my nitrogen siphon, which I'm excited for using later on for nitrogen-infused custard.

Speaker 8 In case you've never played with a nitrogen siphon, I have not yet had that particular joy.

Speaker 1 It's how you make something foamy if you happen to be a high-tech chef or baker.

Speaker 8 You use it to infuse a liquid with tiny bubbles of nitrous oxide.

Speaker 9 Tom had brought his own ingredients and pudding gear, but he'd also done Selassie's shopping. Rhubarb though, I see.

Speaker 18 As for Selassie, I don't know what the rhubarb's about. I'm assuming he's using rhubarb because he hasn't asked for any dried fruit.

Speaker 18 But I wouldn't put it, I wouldn't put it past him that he gets here and he's like, where's my dried fruit?

Speaker 18 And I'll be like, and the picture of the note that you scrolled by hand with no measurements on it and sent to me saying buy this, which was sent to me sideways. You are in the bitch.
Yeah, I am.

Speaker 8 Celeste hadn't shown up yet on his trademark motorbike, but his ingredients were there.

Speaker 9 And Jan went shopping for her ingredients in her pantry.

Speaker 20 So I've chosen a steamed pudding, and for that, I'm gonna make some limoncello-soaked blueberries. So the blueberries are dried.
So, because the lemons and blueberries work really well.

Speaker 20 I've used it previously

Speaker 20 in an episode, so I know that it works. Which episode was there?

Speaker 20 It was the show that I went out on.

Speaker 20 So

Speaker 20 it's a winning combination.

Speaker 20 It's purely because I love the flavours.

Speaker 20 And plus,

Speaker 20 dried blueberries lying in the cupboard, not looking sad, so I had to use them. Had currants, but these are more exciting, I think.

Speaker 9 So we've got Tim the rookie with his Yankee dick. We've got Yan with her winning combination of lemon and blueberries.
Tom also went shopping in his cupboard for something to go with the whiskey.

Speaker 18 I am making an apricot, pistachio and sage spotted dick.

Speaker 18 Then we're putting a sage and Lafroue syrup over the top and using a Lafreue Demerrera Sugar nitrogenised

Speaker 18 custard, which is going to be really light and fluffy. It's weird stuff, but it tastes amazing.

Speaker 1 Why these flavours?

Speaker 41 When Nicola said, hey, would you do puddings?

Speaker 18 I had those flavours in my cupboard. And I was like, yeah, okay, we'll try and see what it does.
And I like sage and everything. Sage is amazing.

Speaker 18 Sage and whiskey goes particularly well together. And I thought, why not? And I don't like raisins.

Speaker 29 So that's Jan and Tom, but we're still missing one.

Speaker 2 And if comments on our Facebook page are any indication, we have some pick off fans who are also quite fond of Selassie.

Speaker 9 I will admit, I too have a giant crush on Selassie.

Speaker 24 If you remember the season that Selassie and Tom were on, you probably aren't surprised to hear that Selassie showed up late.

Speaker 3 Hey!

Speaker 16 Hey!

Speaker 16 Sorry, allowed to help an old lady across the road.

Speaker 9 Selassie's excuse was literally that he had to help an old lady across the road.

Speaker 13 Selassie, even though he seemed quite chill as he whipped his helmet off, the stakes at our gastropod put-off were high for him.

Speaker 8 When he took part in bake-off, he was a banker.

Speaker 9 But he'd since thrown that in to train as a pastry chef in Switzerland. In other words, he's gone pro.

Speaker 8 But he's still the same Selassie who constantly forgot ingredients during his time in the tent.

Speaker 19 I'm trying to keep it simple, but without the raisins, only only because I forgot to include that in my recipe.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 19 I'm making a simple custard for vanilla custard and I'm going to make a hopefully it works. I'm going to make a rhubarb jelly and cut into cubes and that's just going to be used for decoration.

Speaker 19 I was going to make a crumble like

Speaker 19 but we don't have an oven do we so I was going to make a speculous crumble but yeah sorry

Speaker 45 it's your fault.

Speaker 9 We'll make do with what you have.

Speaker 8 All the contestants had been warned this kitchen was fairly basic. Each contestant had just one induction burner they could use for both their custards and their actual puddings.

Speaker 2 Sorry?

Speaker 20 This is better than my own kitchen. I may well move in.

Speaker 9 I really played up the basic nature. I'm sorry.

Speaker 9 I just wanted expectations to be low. It's really how I operate.

Speaker 20 They basically described it like some cave with a whisk.

Speaker 20 And maybe some fire.

Speaker 9 In reality, the kitchen was quite high-tech. The lovely Sam Bompass of Bompass and Par, you'll remember him as the star of our jelly episode.

Speaker 9 He loaned us his test kitchen for the night, along with the fabulous Danny, the Bompass and Par development chef, for which we will be eternally grateful.

Speaker 9 But it was pretty small for the baking of four spotted dicks.

Speaker 30 Still, everyone was in good spirits.

Speaker 25 We poured some drinks, and the bakers got right to work on their spotted dicks.

Speaker 9 If you've closed your eyes, it was kind of like the TV show.

Speaker 15 This is just lucky being in the tank. It is.

Speaker 46 As we've said, all the bakers were riffing off the same classic British pudding, spotted dick.

Speaker 8 But before we get to what is spotted dick, where does that name come from, and why is it a pudding, I want to know why weren't they all baking versions of sticky toffee pudding?

Speaker 9 I mean, just think for a second, Cynthia. How much more fun is it to say spotted dick repeatedly than sticky toffee pudding? To be fair, it's not that I don't love a good sticky toffee pudding.

Speaker 9 It's not for nothing that it's one of the most popular puddings in the UK.

Speaker 21 It's an icon, is probably the best way to describe it. It is such a classic British pudding in terms of you will see it on everything from restaurants to pubs to microwave meals.

Speaker 21 Everyone loves a sticky toffee pudding. It's got that kind of indulgent yet comforting feeling.

Speaker 31 Felicity Cloak has many claims to fame.

Speaker 10 You will soon hear her as one of the expert tasters of our great gastropod put-off.

Speaker 9 But more to the point, she's one of my favourite cookbook authors and recipe writers. She does this column in The Guardian, the perfect version of everything, that is amazing.

Speaker 9 It was her perfect sticky toffee pudding that I sent to Tim to make for Cynthia's birthday.

Speaker 1 Successfully and totally deliciously.

Speaker 9 So, for those of you who haven't yet had the extreme pleasure, we asked Felicity, what is a perfect sticky toffee pudding?

Speaker 21 It's a sort of batter pudding with dates in it, so it's quite rich but still fluffy, and then it has a really rich, buttery toffee sauce poured over the top.

Speaker 21 And then, ideally, it's served with ice cream and custard, but you know, that is going above and beyond with the indulgence.

Speaker 21 But the interesting thing about it is that it's not actually a British pudding at all, it's a Canadian pudding, and it's quite recent. Wait, what?

Speaker 13 But didn't Felicity just say that it's an iconic British dish?

Speaker 21 So, everyone thinks that it's the kind of thing that you see in boarding school stories and Charles Dickens and stuff, and actually, it's I think it's a sort of 1920s Canadian thing.

Speaker 21 But, you know, we're magpies, we've been stealing things from all over the world for centuries, and we're not going to stop now, apparently.

Speaker 9 Okay, so according to Felicity, Oliver Twist would never have sat down to a sticky toffee pudding. But I'm confused.

Speaker 9 Who did the stealing, and why is sticky toffee pudding virtually unknown in Canada if that's where it came from? This makes no sense.

Speaker 21 Probably the best-known origin myth is from the Sharrow Bay Hotel in the Lake District, and it was quite famous in, I think, the 19 sort of 1960s, and it was a sort of a rare oasis of good cooking in what was at the time a little bit, apparently, of a culinary desert.

Speaker 22 Like so many dishes we talk about on this show, there's an origin myth, and then there's what's more likely the truth, although even that is kind of hard to figure out.

Speaker 9 The myth is that this chef at the Sharrow Bay Hotel in northern England, his name was Francis Coulson, he invented sticky toffee pudding.

Speaker 9 Then there's a rival myth: the Cartmell Village Shop, just a few miles down the road from the Sharo Bay Hotel. They claim to be the home of sticky toffee.

Speaker 9 And you can find Cartmell Village Shop ready-made sticky toffee puds in supermarkets all over the UK. And then still others say it was actually invented in a hotel in Aberdeenshire in Scotland.

Speaker 34 Felicity thinks the Sherrow Bay Hotel Francis Coulson theory is the closest.

Speaker 21 But the interesting thing is that actually, if you dig a little bit deeper from these these off-pedaled origin stories,

Speaker 21 you can find out that actually I think Francis was friendly with a Canadian woman, and there's definitely been very similar puddings found that are much earlier and from Canada.

Speaker 21 So it seems likely that he made it famous, but probably didn't invent it.

Speaker 9 There is some evidence to back this up.

Speaker 9 Francis Coulson apparently confessed to a fellow British chef that he borrowed the original recipe from a lovely woman in Lancashire called called Patricia, or in some versions of the story, Peggy.

Speaker 9 And apparently, she'd got the recipe, which maybe involved maple syrup rather than toffee sauce. She'd got it from a Canadian serviceman who was stationed at her house during the Second World War.

Speaker 21 Which sort of makes sense as an origin. So I don't know.
Unfortunately, lost in the mists of time and sort of weighed down by layers of toffee sauce, is

Speaker 21 how he got that recipe from her. And, you know, did he eat it at her house? Where did it come from? We don't know.

Speaker 1 So, the origins of sticky toffee pudding are still kind of a mystery, but it seems pretty clear it's not originally British, and it's not actually a pudding.

Speaker 21 It is an unusual pudding, and I said it's not this kind of standard pudding that people here would make.

Speaker 9 It is a pudding, in the sense that all desserts in England can be called puddings, but it's not a pudding pudding, if you see what I mean.

Speaker 24 I have no idea what you mean.

Speaker 9 Even I was confused about what a British pudding truly was, to be honest, and I'm British. So, So we went to consult the expert in Belgium.

Speaker 47 As one does.

Speaker 1 What a beautiful tea you've made for us here.

Speaker 52 Well, I enjoy making an effort in tea.

Speaker 52 My name is Regola Isawien. I'm from Belgium, from Flanders, the Dutch-speaking area of Belgium.
And I have written a book called Pride and Pudding.

Speaker 52 and a book called The National Trust Book of Puddings about the history of British puddings, savoury and sweet.

Speaker 9 Yes, a Flemish Belgian is in fact the world's expert on British puddings.

Speaker 8 As you might imagine, Regula is a hardcore anglophile. So we asked her, what is a pudding?

Speaker 52 So a pudding can be lots of different things. It can be savoury, which is the actual mother of pudding, the alpha pudding, which is Haggis type of dishes, and sausages, black pudding, blood sausage.

Speaker 52 That's what the mother of puddings is. But pudding can also be be sweet and that's what it evolved to through the ages.

Speaker 52 And today pudding is synonymous for dessert.

Speaker 9 But while

Speaker 52 all desserts can be pudding, not all puddings can be dessert.

Speaker 9 Hmm. That answer was not exactly crystal clear.
So we also asked Felicity and got pretty much the same answer.

Speaker 21 I mean, it's a really, it is a blurred line and then diagram terms, there's an awful lot of overlap.

Speaker 21 so pudding can generally mean dessert in general so anything from a slice of birthday cake you can say what are we having for pudding it could be that or a fruit salad if you're my mum but also more specifically it does refer to the sort of slightly heavier less fancy sort of traditional pudding so a really probably not a fail-safe but quite a good rule is that if it's French or Italian it's probably not a pudding it's a dessert but if it's, you know, British or Irish, then it probably qualifies as a pudding.

Speaker 21 But then, of course, you have the vexed question of stuff like black pudding and hogs pudding, which are sausages and definitely shouldn't be eaten for dessert. So that's hard.

Speaker 21 Haggis is also a pudding, and obviously that contains all sorts of offal.

Speaker 21 So there's sort of three different meanings, and I don't know how long you have to live here to figure it out.

Speaker 24 As someone who has never lived in the UK, I literally once texted Nikki in the middle of Great British Bake Off to ask, how can there be a pudding week if all desserts are puddings?

Speaker 9 The questions that really matter. Brought to you by Cynthia Graeger.

Speaker 14 I was really stressed out about this.

Speaker 9 Bakeoff is so stressful that I have to watch from behind a cushion, so I feel you. But the key to understanding pudding is really what regular just called the mother of all puddings, haggis.

Speaker 9 The traditional Scottish dish of meat, oatmeal, and seasoning stuffed in a stomach and boiled.

Speaker 30 One theory is that the word pudding comes from the Latin botellis, which means sausage or small intestine.

Speaker 22 But in general, the word describes dishes that were made by boiling stuffed animal bag-like organs like intestines or stomachs or even wombs.

Speaker 52 And I think that pudding dishes come from a necessity to use up every bit of the animal, but also a necessity to how are you going to prepare things?

Speaker 52 Because they didn't have little pots and pans and a nice stove with three hubs and all that.

Speaker 52 They only had this animal and an open fire, and they had to prepare food and they had to see how can we do this without any vessels.

Speaker 4 We talked about this before in our pots and pans episode.

Speaker 8 Fire was used for cooking long before people had any pots and pans.

Speaker 9 So they used the handy bags that came with the animals and they stuffed all the little smaller bits of meat and fat that you couldn't roast into these bag-like intestines.

Speaker 9 And hey, Presto, you have what we know as a sausage or a pudding. Exactly.

Speaker 52 Puddings and sausages are exactly the same. It's just because we have lost track of what a pudding is, because today we think of pudding as sweet things.

Speaker 8 There are still some sausages in the UK that are called puddings, like black pudding. If you've ever been to a classic British restaurant, you might have eaten it.

Speaker 8 It's made with blood, that's why it looks black, and it's usually fried.

Speaker 10 It's got a soft texture, it's part of a full English breakfast.

Speaker 9 These kinds of encased boiled sausages, stuffed with meat and fat and herbs, and maybe some grain as a filler, they're the original puddings. and they go way back.

Speaker 52 In Homer's Odyssey in 800s before Christ, there is the story of Homer returning home from the Battle of Troy and finding his house full of suitors to marry his wife because she thought that he had died in the battle.

Speaker 52 And there is one paragraph where he describes that there is black pudding being made in his house. So that's how we know that puddings have always been around.

Speaker 24 These types of dishes were popular all over Europe, but they looked different depending on where you lived.

Speaker 1 In Mediterranean countries, sausages had a denser, harder texture because they could be cured in the dry air.

Speaker 9 And there's not a lot of dry air in the UK. It's a tad bit more drizzly.
So puddings in Britain became different, softer and squidgier.

Speaker 9 And just like the Italians and Spanish loved their cured sausages, well, we love our puddings.

Speaker 52 Already in the 17th century, we can clearly see that pudding was considered something really English, quintessentially English, and that we know from a diary of a Frenchman who travelled around England and his name was Francois Maximilian Mison and he wrote Blessed be he that invented pudding because it is a mana that hits the palates of all sorts of people, a manna better than that of the wilderness because the people are never weary of it.

Speaker 52 Oh, what an excellent thing is an English pudding to come in pudding time is as much as to say to come in the most lucky moment in the world.

Speaker 53 And this is a Frenchman being quite lyrical about English food.

Speaker 9 Which is not something you hear very often, to be perfectly honest.

Speaker 6 You might have noticed that the Frenchman said it was an excellent thing to come at pudding time.

Speaker 24 People often ate puddings at the beginning of the meal, and they were such an integral part of that meal that dinner time was literally called pudding time.

Speaker 9 And one of the most famous pre-dinner puddings is still super popular today, Yorkshire pudding.

Speaker 9 This is a batter that's traditionally cooked underneath the roasting joint of meat to soak up the dripping.

Speaker 52 And the farming families, they would have the pudding before the meat, because it would fill them up and it would stretch the meat for longer and maybe even have leftovers for the next day.

Speaker 52 Now, the really poor families, they didn't have even a pudding.

Speaker 9 And the rich, well, of course, they had plenty of meat to go around, but they also loved a good pudding. They jazzed up their puddings with expensive ingredients, dried fruit, and spices and herbs.

Speaker 52 And they always perceived puddings to be sweet because they were always flavored with spices like ginger and cinnamon and they always had sweet herbs and then sometimes currants and figs and all kinds of things that sweetened it before there was sugar around.

Speaker 8 Sweet is a relative word here. There wasn't that much honey around and there was even less sugar.

Speaker 1 Cooks added dried fruit to their meat or fish dishes, which isn't that weird?

Speaker 26 Figs or plums or dried cherries with meat or orange peel with fish?

Speaker 52 It's delicious. In the past, they didn't really care about the fact that fish should be savory.
They just thought, what can we do with the texture of this meat? And what can we make of it?

Speaker 52 And of course, because we are human, we like sweet things.

Speaker 9 Two things happened to change the destiny of pudding and make it synonymous with dessert. The first was sugar.
Sugar was a rare and expensive spice spice in the Middle Ages.

Speaker 9 Only the rich could add it to their stuffed intestines.

Speaker 8 And then Europeans set up plantations with slave labor in the Caribbean and Central and South America.

Speaker 4 Sugar was still expensive, but it became more common.

Speaker 46 And then finally, mechanization and expansion made it even cheaper in the 1800s.

Speaker 8 That was the turning point.

Speaker 52 So the introduction of sugar too puddings, it goes quite quietly for a while until it becomes relatively cheap in the 19th century.

Speaker 9 The second thing that relegated pudding from a main course dish to its own category at the end of the meal is something we've talked about before.

Speaker 52 The shift from dining à la française, where everything was just served all at the same time, banquet style, to dining a la rousse, which is a style where there are some dishes on the table, but then there will be footmen and they will come and present a silver platter with some salmon, with some asparagus, and the chef has more control about how food is combined onto the plates of the dining dining guests.

Speaker 52 And that is when, of course, people start thinking: like, should there be a sweet pudding on the table when we're having salmon and asparagus?

Speaker 52 And they start finding that quite strange, and it starts moving towards the end of the meal.

Speaker 9 Again, like the introduction of sugar, the migration of sweet things to the end of the meal was slow.

Speaker 9 It took place over decades, with the super-rich changing their eating habits first, and the poor, well, they weren't eating multi-course meals until much later.

Speaker 26 And as everyone starts to be able to get a hold of more sugar and they move that sweet dish to the end of the meal, they also think, hey, let's get rid of the meat in our puddings.

Speaker 8 Meat belongs in the savory course.

Speaker 26 These sweet puddings become pure sweet.

Speaker 9 So they get rid of the meat in their puddings, but they keep all the dried fruit and the spices and the sugar and the grains and even the animal fat.

Speaker 9 And the result is what we think of as British pudding today. Puddings like spotted dick.
That smells really good.

Speaker 55 Very pretty in pink. I like that.

Speaker 56 What's in it?

Speaker 45 It's just rhubarb.

Speaker 9 Meanwhile, back in the put-off kitchen, things were going well. At least for some of the bakers.

Speaker 14 Tim, I just also have to say to the listeners that you just are like, you haven't even slept all night.

Speaker 41 Yeah, so I was on the red eye from Boston, didn't sleep a wink, and now here I am trying to pretend I know how to cook.

Speaker 5 Tim's hands were a little shaky, I'm not going to lie to you.

Speaker 2 Here he was, zero sleep, ingredients and equipment slept across the ocean, competing against against some of the very best amateur bakers in the UK.

Speaker 26 Could he make it work? And would he forgive me if everything fell apart?

Speaker 9 Yeah, seriously, you were potentially even more nervous than Tim, Cynthia. Let's be honest here.

Speaker 9 But even Jan was experiencing some baking issues, which we are going to tell you about after this break.

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Speaker 9 So you're making two kinds of pudding now.

Speaker 16 Showing off?

Speaker 9 No, because this, do you know what?

Speaker 20 I'll do the exactly the exact same thing at home. I was standing there going, oh, well, I'm in the kitchen now.
I've made a mess. Might as well make it worth it.

Speaker 8 Jan wasn't actually making two puddings to show off.

Speaker 8 She got nervous that we were going to be sticklers about using all the traditional ingredients in a spotted dick because originally the fat for spotted dick was something called suet.

Speaker 20 And it wasn't until I read it a bit later, and plus, you know, when the others put the fear of God into you and go, oh yeah, well, I'm not using suet, I'm not going to use Trex. I thought,

Speaker 20 shit, have I read the thing wrong? Explicit, sorry, explicit. But have I read the directions wrong? So I quickly adapted, which I'm able to, hopefully.
Let's see, we'll see.

Speaker 9 We'll see, shall we?

Speaker 20 I was quickly able to adapt.

Speaker 9 Jan decided to carefully cover her rear end by making four puddings total: two with butter, as she'd originally planned, and two with the traditional suet.

Speaker 21 So, suet is, I think, a very underrated ingredient, but interestingly, one that's clearly still popular because you'll find it in almost every supermarket here, as well as the butchers.

Speaker 21 So, what it is, is it's the fat from around generally a cow, although you can get it from sheep, I believe pigs, but it's almost always beef.

Speaker 21 And it's the fat from around the kidneys, which is a very sort of fine white fat. So it's not like beef dripping that you might fry your chips in.
It's very, very white. It's very sort of flaky.

Speaker 9 Most people in the UK don't actually buy that flaky kind of suet from the butchers. Like Felicity says, you can also get this sort of processed pellet version in the shops, which is much less beefy.

Speaker 9 And the same company also makes a vegetarian version from palm and sunflower oil.

Speaker 29 The point is, though, that cooking with suet is different from cooking with other fats like butter.

Speaker 8 Felicity explained why suet is so particularly amazing.

Speaker 21 It has a very high melting point so unlike butter that as soon as you put it in the oven or you start cooking it in any way it dissolves into the batter suet stays intact for much longer and so it gives a much lighter texture to the you know the structure of the the sponge because the air holes are bigger because it's had time to form around them before they've melted.

Speaker 21 So you get a lovely light result that it's very hard to achieve with butter or vegetable fat or anything like that. And so I think mostly it's still used because of that.

Speaker 1 This lightness is nice today, sure, but it would have been critical a few hundred years ago.

Speaker 50 Baking powder was only invented in the mid-1800s.

Speaker 9 Okay, so Jan was using suet and butter side by side.

Speaker 24 Didn't even occur to Tim to use suet, and we wouldn't have known where to find a veg version in the US.

Speaker 1 He went straight for butter.

Speaker 9 Tom went traditional with suet, and Selassie, surprise, surprise, substituted trex, which is vegetable shortening, when he couldn't find suet at his corner shop.

Speaker 9 But all of our bakers went a little bit new school when it came to what they were baking their puddings in. No intestines here.

Speaker 27 This is also at this point kind of old school.

Speaker 35 By the 1700s, intestines for puddings were already on their way out.

Speaker 9 It became a special occasion thing, like haggis for hogmane or Scottish New Year.

Speaker 6 But people wanted to eat pudding all year round, not just when they'd slaughtered an animal.

Speaker 52 People had to be creative if if they wanted to use something else than a bag like intestine, so they used things like saucers from teacups and plates which they would put together and all kinds of things just because they wanted to make pudding.

Speaker 52 I always imagine looking at an English person from that period as looking around in the kitchen like, what can I make a pudding in?

Speaker 9 What can I make a pudding in? The pudding cloth was the first big step forward. With a muslin cloth, you could wrap the contents of your pudding, tie it together into a bowl, and hey, presto.

Speaker 6 And then when manufacturing got going, putting tins and putting basins became all the rage.

Speaker 9 I am the proud owner of a pudding basin, which you just put your pudding mix in and then tie a cloth or more often tinfoil over the top with string.

Speaker 1 Which, of course, Selassie had forgotten.

Speaker 9 String.

Speaker 9 Danny is your man.

Speaker 45 String.

Speaker 18 Or something to hold this. Rubber band.

Speaker 1 Tim didn't realize it should be tinfoil on top. He just knew he had to cover his mini spotted dicks as they cooked.

Speaker 1 So, like those 18th-century Brits, he improvised by using two differently sized muffin tins and wedging them together.

Speaker 1 This way, his dicks would stay dry as they steamed in the water boiling at the bottom of the pot.

Speaker 9 Steaming, like suet, is another essential element that sets pudding apart from other flour and fat and dried fruit combinations, like, say, cake.

Speaker 9 In fact, this really is what makes a pudding a pudding to my mind. It has to be steamed.

Speaker 21 It's a very gentle form of cooking because it's obviously not in direct heat, it's in water.

Speaker 21 And also because it's moist, so even though it's got it's in the ceramic basin, the top has a sort of porous, you know, either it's wrapped in muslin or, you know, more modern people would probably use foil.

Speaker 21 And so there is a certain amount, I think, of moisture sort of gets in at the top. And so it's just a sort of gentler form.
It's much slower.

Speaker 21 It will take, I think, a Christmas pudding will probably take you about six or seven hours to cook in total.

Speaker 21 So it's not fast, but it does give, I think, a gentler result, and you're not going to get any browning or anything like that.

Speaker 21 So, they quite often look slightly pallid and unappetizing, but they're always super moist and delicious.

Speaker 37 Tim kept an eagle eye over his Yankee dicks as they cooked, because that water can boil away if you're not careful.

Speaker 30 Steamed puddings are not the most hands-off recipe to make.

Speaker 21 You can't just, you know, shove it in the oven and forget about it. You have to, you know, keep an eye on it.
It's bubbling away, it will boil dry.

Speaker 21 As soon as you leave the room, you'll suddenly hear this hissing and go, oh god, the water's boiled, you know, out and my pan is burning.

Speaker 31 Someone forgot to give this memo to Tom, though.

Speaker 9 What happened was, at one point I noticed he disappeared and I wandered around the corner and found him at the sink.

Speaker 40 You're just over here doing the dishes.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 18 Someone's got to.

Speaker 9 This is not what it's like on Baco.

Speaker 18 No, there's a person to do the dishes who, on our year, we were told like basically most of her skin fell off because she would have her hands in boiling dishwater the whole time. Yeah.

Speaker 18 So you just kind of wave and the things disappear off your desk and they get... And if you're like, I need a new bowl, one appears for you.
It's wonderful.

Speaker 24 That was super sweet of Tom to get going on the dishes, but then I caught up with him a few minutes later when he was back at his cookstation.

Speaker 6 Some fun stuff going on over here.

Speaker 55 See the steaming basket going on?

Speaker 5 Yeah, well, I let it boil dry, so.

Speaker 4 But that's what the smell of burning is.

Speaker 18 That's what the smell of burning was. It was burning pan.

Speaker 9 Oh, lovely.

Speaker 9 No good deed left unpunished. But while the bakers struggled, Cynthia and I did what we do best.

Speaker 9 We ate.

Speaker 9 Can I try your mix?

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 9 oh that's delish Yan.

Speaker 9 Thank you.

Speaker 20 He tasted lemons, I forgot to put the lemon essence in, doesn't matter. I put a whole lemon zest in, so that should do it.

Speaker 55 Oh, I really want to try the yeah, can I?

Speaker 55 What is it? It's the batter. Lemon taste.

Speaker 21 Delicious, really testy.

Speaker 21 Yum, very nice.

Speaker 16 I want to eat more of the batter.

Speaker 9 And then from Yan's raw pudding batter, we moved on to Tim's raw pudding batter.

Speaker 41 I don't know if it's any good raw, but you can try it.

Speaker 2 Get a cranberry.

Speaker 9 How is it? Is it good? It's good. You can taste the corn.

Speaker 21 It's such a good texture as well.

Speaker 9 I'm liking that.

Speaker 18 We have to play with the milling a lot to get the texture right so it wasn't too crunchy.

Speaker 7 So now you know why spotted dick has suet in it traditionally and why there are traditionally bits of dried fruit in it and why it's steamed.

Speaker 5 But where in the world does that name come from?

Speaker 52 Yes, so spotted dick is probably the coolest name for a dish ever. It basically just means spotted dough because dick was just a word for dough.

Speaker 9 Sorry to pass the bubble. The spots, obviously, are the currants or limoncello-soaked blueberries if you're Yan or cranberries if you're Tim.

Speaker 1 But spotted dick is just one of the many fun traditional British puddings.

Speaker 50 The golden age of puddings was in the 1800s in England.

Speaker 25 People wrote entire cookbooks on the topic and they came up with all sorts of awesome names.

Speaker 52 Then you've got Dead Man's Arm, which is a jam roly poly.

Speaker 52 And another name for that is a shirt sleeve pudding.

Speaker 52 So from from shirt sleeve pudding, it then went to dead man's arm because it looked like a gentleman's arm in a shirt sleeve and the spiral of jam in the middle could be blood, couldn't it?

Speaker 9 If you haven't had a jam roly-poly, well, you haven't lived.

Speaker 9 But to help you picture this dead man's arm, it's a long cylinder pudding, traditionally wrapped in a cloth with raspberry jam rippled through it, and it's delicious.

Speaker 54 In Regula's book, there's Sussex Pudding, Peas Pudding, War and Peace Pudding, and Plum Duff, aka Christmas pudding, which we don't have in America, but apparently it's super traditional in the UK.

Speaker 9 Plum duff is quite a close cousin to Spotted Dick.

Speaker 52 Because duff is a dialect word for dough and plum is a dialect word for old word for raisins.

Speaker 9 So more dough and dried fruit, but with extra spices and darker muscovado sugar to make it more Christmassy.

Speaker 27 Christmas pudding as a Christmas tradition is actually a surprisingly modern invention.

Speaker 54 In the early 20th century, Britain had suffered a lot of losses in the war, and so King George set the groundwork for something called the Empire Marketing Board that would create a surge of patriotism around buying British.

Speaker 52 And in 1925, a recipe for Christmas pudding was distributed entitled, Make Your Pudding from Empire Products. And the massive plum pudding was paraded around the streets of London.

Speaker 9 Sometimes I'm so proud to be British.

Speaker 27 Nikki, I still don't really get this Christmas pudding thing.

Speaker 5 What is it and what are your Christmas traditions around it?

Speaker 9 So the thing most Americans find slightly horrifying about Christmas pudding is how far in advance you make it. You're supposed to make it on Stir-Up Sunday.

Speaker 1 Which is, what is Stir-Up Sunday?

Speaker 9 Yeah, so my knowledge of the Christian side of this is a little fuzzy. I'm more on the pudding side.
But it's about a month before Christmas at the start of Advent.

Speaker 9 And there's a reading that's always read on that Sunday in church that includes the line, Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people.

Speaker 52 They would walk home, and they would idyllically start making the pudding with the entire family. That's what I imagine.
I think it's only the women who would have done it.

Speaker 7 Okay, you go home after hearing that you're supposed to be stirred up and you start stirring up pudding.

Speaker 9 Yes, exactly. And you have to stir it east to west because the three kings came from the east.
It's this really, really dense mix. It's so full of dried fruit, it's actually quite hard to stir.

Speaker 9 And then you steam it, it's cooked, and then you wrap it up and you put it somewhere dry and cool for a month, but then you unwrap it every Sunday to feed it with brandy.

Speaker 38 So you have a dense steamed pudding that you've kept in the pantry for a month and you've been soaking it with brandy every week. Yum? Yep.

Speaker 9 And then you steam it again on Christmas Day and then you stick a sprig of holly on top for decoration and you give it one last dousing with brandy and you set it on fire.

Speaker 52 I have no way of actually scientifically or historically proving this, but but I think the English have always loved dinner theatre, and of course, that would be quite extraordinary, wouldn't it?

Speaker 52 If you would have your pudding with flames.

Speaker 23 So, apparently, setting puddings on fire is something of a tradition, and Selassie decided that setting his pudding on fire would be a good idea in the bompas and par test kitchen as well.

Speaker 5 What are you doing with the blowtorch?

Speaker 19 Just to give that nice caramel mind of the friend.

Speaker 9 You're insured, aren't you, for everything?

Speaker 15 At a sugar cut fire.

Speaker 9 You don't really need the kitchen.

Speaker 8 Wow, that was more exciting than I expected.

Speaker 9 I have to say, doesn't pudding just sound like basically the greatest thing in the world at this point?

Speaker 9 It has the best names, it's the fluffiest and moistest thanks to the suet and steam, and it's definitely the most dramatic dessert out there.

Speaker 3 But other than sticky toffee pudding, which, as we've told you already, is not a traditional British pudding, puddings aren't so popular anymore.

Speaker 6 They kind of lost their shine in the 20th century.

Speaker 9 It's actually the same story we've told you before on Gastropod.

Speaker 9 After the First World War, middle-class people no longer had domestic staff, and then as the century went on, women went out to work, and basically, no one had time to bother with a pudding that needed to be watched for six hours to make sure it didn't boil dry.

Speaker 54 There is a little bit of a pudding revival today, but it's still not a hot dish on the dessert menu, other than, as I've heard, the dining halls in British schools, right?

Speaker 35 Isn't that where most Brits have eaten spotted dick?

Speaker 9 Exactly, which is why many of us have a certain nostalgic fondness for it, even if we haven't eaten it in 20 years. Zambompus is exactly the same.

Speaker 45 Oh, enormous spotted dick. Yeah, real school dinners fair, isn't it?

Speaker 14 Which sort of delight.

Speaker 45 It's not even nostalgia, mystery, horror all intermingled in the same.

Speaker 45 And comedy as well. It's perfect, perfect British dish.

Speaker 8 Well, here in the Bompass and Park kitchen, we are bringing pudding back.

Speaker 9 Because our bakers made mini spotted dicks, they were ready in just a little over an hour. Yans were first.

Speaker 16 Wow, Yan. That's beautiful.

Speaker 9 Oh, it's put!

Speaker 20 Smell it!

Speaker 20 Oh my god! Smell it! Smell it!

Speaker 59 Oh, wow.

Speaker 14 Oh, lovely.

Speaker 17 Oh, divine.

Speaker 9 And then, as the bakers brought their spotted dicks out to the table, our expert panel of Felicity, Sam, and Danny grabbed their spoons and prepared.

Speaker 45 There are factors we're determining what the best spotted dick dick is based on.

Speaker 9 Sam, if you don't know how to judge a spotted dick at your.

Speaker 56 I don't know, but

Speaker 45 is it look, is it texture, is it feel?

Speaker 56 Like, you know,

Speaker 45 what makes a good dick?

Speaker 9 What do you value in the spotted dick? Or a mini dick, I should say.

Speaker 60 It's a horrible wormhole, isn't it?

Speaker 45 I was going to get excited about mouthfeel, but that's.

Speaker 45 When you see the blushes on on radio.

Speaker 14 Everyone's like, oh, that's awkward now.

Speaker 56 Everyone's suddenly are really awkward in the world.

Speaker 9 We are British. I was going to say,

Speaker 22 not the Americans.

Speaker 15 We have no problem.

Speaker 1 After that initial awkwardness, our esteemed panel started off by tasting Tom's mini dicks, which had chopped dried apricot and powdered pistachios and sage and nitrogen-infused foamy LaFroy custard.

Speaker 45 Here we go.

Speaker 21 Okay, I'm going to dig in. Yeah.

Speaker 43 It's quite an aroma wafting up.

Speaker 45 It's the whiskey.

Speaker 21 Yeah, we can smell the whiskey.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's all pests.

Speaker 45 It really rolls across the palate digger.

Speaker 45 It's definitely the most complex spotter dick I've ever had in my life.

Speaker 45 But then,

Speaker 44 probably going from

Speaker 45 that's not very high barrier to entry.

Speaker 42 I love

Speaker 49 the contrast of the airy, moussey, foamy texture, really dense solid.

Speaker 8 Did you say in the stud?

Speaker 14 Yeah,

Speaker 14 it's good.

Speaker 45 But it's what you want. If you have a spotted dick that doesn't make you go into a coma afterwards, then

Speaker 45 it's not the full experience.

Speaker 21 You're right not to put too much sugar into it, because actually there's so much apricot in there that actually it would have been too much. I think it's really well balanced.

Speaker 21 And actually, it's quite... What fat did you use in it?

Speaker 44 Just sue it.

Speaker 17 Okay.

Speaker 21 It's very nice and

Speaker 21 it's like a dumpling, which I guess a steamed pudding is basically.

Speaker 9 lovely.

Speaker 21 My god, that custard is quite strong.

Speaker 11 It was great.

Speaker 21 If I get arrested cycling home, I will be citing you.

Speaker 9 Next up was Yan with her butter dick and her suet dick side by side. The suet version was the clear crowd favourite.

Speaker 18 Definitely that one.

Speaker 43 That's really good.

Speaker 21 And they're both good, but that is more of a spotted dick, obviously, more of a spotted dick.

Speaker 49 The taste of England, that English baking, I think, right there.

Speaker 45 This is something you can really like gnaw on and then

Speaker 8 hefty. What is the taste of English baking?

Speaker 5 What does that mean to you?

Speaker 49 So it's like just that heavy using dried fruits along with like the rich custard. Yes, exactly.
It like does, yeah, like that's my nan in a flavour.

Speaker 16 That sounds good.

Speaker 56 Don't put anything too extraneous in there.

Speaker 45 Don't fancy it about.

Speaker 1 Next up was Selassie's, which looked absolutely gorgeous.

Speaker 9 It's looking good.

Speaker 9 Presentation maximum points, I think. Gorgeous.

Speaker 45 It's like if you could ever have a bouquet of spotted dicks, this is it.

Speaker 9 As Tom pointed out, though, without any dried fruit, it was really more of a spotless dick.

Speaker 45 That's good.

Speaker 36 That's good.

Speaker 4 Everyone then moved on to Tim's Yankee dick with a maple and rum custard, which I have to admit was basically the opposite of Selassie's in terms of appearance.

Speaker 45 I think it is quite a revelation because it's probably like the beigest thing I've ever seen in my entire life.

Speaker 45 It's like, you know, it's like you can't even describe the colour because it's sort of khaki on a plate.

Speaker 56 But then, no, but then the taste is really good, so you know, it's flavor over presentation.

Speaker 12 Flavor over presentation, yeah.

Speaker 9 At this point, Cynthia and I were basically dying. Everyone else was eating pudding and we were holding microphones.
It was extremely painful. But for you, dear listeners, we will do anything.

Speaker 1 Like Nikki said, we were dying.

Speaker 30 I wanted to dive right in, but prizes had to be awarded.

Speaker 42 What do you reckon?

Speaker 45 Slow down.

Speaker 21 It's hard because they're apples and pears, isn't it?

Speaker 49 Innovation and then like the classic, truest form of the classic.

Speaker 45 What it brings to you, yeah.

Speaker 43 And I

Speaker 45 wholeheartedly love the um

Speaker 45 uh is it Tom's?

Speaker 45 The whiskey one. Yeah.
I know like Kevin go back to that and back to that and back to

Speaker 45 back.

Speaker 16 Intimidation through the glass.

Speaker 49 We're being intimidated.

Speaker 9 There's somebody watching over the judging here.

Speaker 8 That intimidation, that was Selassie pressed up full body against the glass, staring at all of us. But we pressed on.

Speaker 49 Yeah, and also the other toss-up is presentation.

Speaker 49 And there was some really tasty stuff going on, and the presentation was kind of like very kind of grassroots.

Speaker 42 That's been polite. That's right.

Speaker 21 Rustic.

Speaker 49 And then some of it was very elevated.

Speaker 44 Yeah.

Speaker 9 I think

Speaker 21 if we're judging just

Speaker 21 on the spotted dick itself,

Speaker 21 then

Speaker 21 I think, yeah, Tom's was

Speaker 21 the most interesting I think because of that the way that it was so intensely savoury and yet it had those apricots and the sage but I really liked Tim's with the cornmeal that was the one that made me think I want to try making a spotted dick with another type of grain because it had a really interesting texture the cornmeal for me I stood out like from the moment I tasted it in terms of delivery and it's just because it was so different and

Speaker 49 interesting

Speaker 49 and just really good.

Speaker 45 There was also none of that nostalgia though. And it was so sort of

Speaker 45 so culturally alien in terms of what a spotted dick is.

Speaker 45 If it wasn't presented to me and said, this is spotted dick, I wouldn't have got it.

Speaker 21 Yeah, I might have thought it, yeah, it was a traditional Native American cake.

Speaker 49 The blueberry spotted dick.

Speaker 21 That was very classic.

Speaker 43 Nailed it, didn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 21 Yeah. None of them were rubbish.
That was the problem.

Speaker 49 I'm going to controversially, I think, go with the cornmeal and stand by it.

Speaker 9 Explain your reasoning.

Speaker 47 Just because

Speaker 49 I just enjoyed it the most. Like the texture was so, it just didn't come across like it was a steamed pudding in any way whatsoever.

Speaker 49 So to be able to achieve that by using some different products than you know the standard with the same process, it just amazed me that it was, that's what came out.

Speaker 49 And the custard was delicious, even if it was a little bit like scrambled eggs.

Speaker 42 But it was delicious.

Speaker 21 And the presentation wasn't anything great, Hemann.

Speaker 49 Absolute zero.

Speaker 15 Minus.

Speaker 17 But, you know.

Speaker 21 It's not the point of a spotted date really there.

Speaker 49 And it's radio, not telling.

Speaker 17 Sure, it's good.

Speaker 12 All right.

Speaker 9 Sam, put your steak in the ground.

Speaker 45 Well, I might have been a little bit novel, though, by the amount of Lafreux whiskey that was in Tom's.

Speaker 45 It is.

Speaker 45 It is a spirit that I have a great affection to. And I really revelled in it.

Speaker 42 It was great.

Speaker 21 So I have the casting to vote unless I'm going to to go for another one complete, you know.

Speaker 34 If this were the great British bake-off, we'd cut to an ad break.

Speaker 1 And so that's just what we're going to do. The winner will be revealed after this break.

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Speaker 55 What are you hoping for today in the founders?

Speaker 61 Scrappy, traction-oriented grinders and hustlers who will blow through every brick wall in this building to get to where they need to be?

Speaker 59 Welcome to the pitch season 14, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. On this season of the show, 10 VCs, seven startups with one shot to build the company of their dreams.

Speaker 40 Oh my God, we built the entirely wrong product.

Speaker 59 Two shots to build the company of their dreams.

Speaker 40 With that intro, let's go.

Speaker 59 Season 14 is available now wherever you listen to podcasts. So subscribe to the pitch so you don't miss it.
This season is presented by Adobe.

Speaker 36 Now, we are going to tell you who won the great Gastropod put-off.

Speaker 9 Felicity has the honour tonight of presenting the pink jelly.

Speaker 21 It's my great pleasure and privilege tonight to announce the winner of the first annual Gastropod

Speaker 21 put-off, British edition. And the winner is, and it was very hard and we nearly came to fisticuffs over various custard things in there, but the winner is

Speaker 21 bake off silence

Speaker 9 Tom

Speaker 21 let me present you with this jelly

Speaker 18 I just don't know what to say this is what I've always

Speaker 18 finally beat Selassie I mean what

Speaker 18 yeah well it was good fun I enjoyed it

Speaker 11 thank you all

Speaker 45 I wish every Friday ended like this

Speaker 14 amazing it's so good

Speaker 9 I do too, Sam. I do too.
If I spent every Friday night of my life at a put-off, I would not be sad.

Speaker 1 I just want to add that Tim was so thrilled to sort of come in second.

Speaker 1 Yes, his spotted dick was pretty ugly, but he invented a new dish and held his own against all these amazing, amazing bakers who we all totally love, so we were both pretty proud.

Speaker 8 We have his recipe and Tom's winning recipe on our website, as well as links to Felicity's perfect version of Sticky Toffee Pudding and Spotted Dick, all on our website, website, gastropod.com.

Speaker 9 And I was pretty proud that such amazing bakers were willing to come out and spend a Friday evening baking with Gastropod. Huge, huge, huge thanks to Tom Gilliford for making it happen.

Speaker 9 He's working on a cocktail book right now, folks, so you'll be hearing more from him soon. And thanks also to baker stars Jan and Selassie.
We have links on our website.

Speaker 6 Thanks once again to Sam Bompass and Danny Cheatham of Bompass and Par.

Speaker 28 You have our endless thanks for letting us come in and take over your test kitchen for the evening.

Speaker 34 And thanks to Felicity Cloak as well, to all three of you for being perfect pudding tasters.

Speaker 9 Felicity's recipes are literally perfect, and she's coming out with a new book this summer based on her very own bicycle Tour de France. It's already on my wish list.
We have links at gastrobod.com.

Speaker 54 I'd also like to give a special shout out to Nikki for coming up with the idea for this put-off, reaching out to Tom, and doing all sorts of crazy behind-the-scenes London work to make it come together.

Speaker 25 Absolutely amazing.

Speaker 8 And thanks to our incredible intern, Emily Pontecorvo.

Speaker 3 The pudding gifts are due to her magic. Finally, thanks so much to the queen of British puddings, the Belgian author Regula Izuin.

Speaker 1 Her book is called Pride and Pudding, and she has a new one coming out with the National Trust of the summer.

Speaker 8 We have links, of course. And thank you, Regula, also for feeding us such delicious puddings.

Speaker 9 When we left Regula's house, we were, in fact, stuffed like puddings. It was a lovely feeling.

Speaker 9 We have so many fabulous extras this episode, like the romantic story of custard powder, that we had to save some for our special super fan newsletter.

Speaker 9 So, if you can support us at that level, now's the time. But your support at any level is essential to keeping the show going.
Thank you.

Speaker 13 We are going to be back in two weeks with a brand new episode.

Speaker 1 Till then.