Throwback Thursday: Asynpoeding (vinegar pudding)

Sweet and sour, as anyone who has “eaten Chinese” knows, is a winning combination of flavour, pleasing the palate on several levels. There’s nothing bitter as such but the sweetness and sourness balance each other superbly and, as with most desserts, there is a tiny bit of salt there, indiscernible as it may be. It’s the element that brings out the other flavours, accentuating the flavour palette.

It is much like malva pudding, the difference being that vinegar component. As for precisely how much vinegar to put in, you need to taste and trust your palate when making (and tasting as you go) the sauce, but the consensus is that it should be about a quarter of the amount of water.

Many recipes call for the water, sugar and vinegar to be boiled together for three minutes. Some say it must be covered with a lid or foil while boiling. I dare to differ. I think it needs to be uncovered and that the sauce should be allowed to reduce a little to make it less “watery” as such. Bear in mind that the batter is going to be spooned on top of this, in an oven dish, and while in the oven, a certain sorcery is going to happen so that they combine to make a pudding with its own sauce.

But to have this sauce just a bit more syrupy in consistency surely cannot harm.

It is not required to add any dried fruit, but it is commonplace to add raisins or perhaps slivers of dried apricots to an asynpoeding. I chose seedless raisins.

Surprisingly, dear old Kook en Geniet/ Cook&Enjoy gives you the option of butter or margarine in the batter mixture. Heaven forfend. It must be butter; doubtless, we don’t make vinegar pudding very often, so we might as well throw in butter rather than the maddeningly ubiquitous “marge”, an affront to baking. (And to fried eggs! In fact, to anything. There is nothing that isn’t better with butter.)

There’s a bit of jam in there too, for that lovely jammy finish that a good South African pudding should always have.

Some recipes call for it to be baked while covered with a lid or foil. The reason is the fear that when the sauce rises it may spill over. But it needs to brown, so as long as you use a deep enough dish it would be best to bake it uncovered and become beautifully browned on top.

Ingredients

For the sauce:

500 ml water

500 ml brown sugar

125 ml brown grape vinegar

For the batter:

60 g (4 Tbsp) butter

80 ml / ⅓ cup sugar

2 XL eggs

1 heaped Tbsp apricot jam

½ tsp ground ginger

¼ tsp ground cinnamon

¼ tsp ground nutmeg

Pinch of salt

1 cup cake flour 

⅓ cup seedless raisins

⅓ cup seedless raisins

160 ml full cream milk, slightly warmed but not boiled

4 ml bicarbonate of soda (just less than a scant teaspoon)

Method

Preheat the oven to 190°C.

Bring the sugar and water to a boil and stir until fully dissolved. Add the vinegar, return to the boil and continue boiling on a moderate heat, uncovered, until slightly reduced; about 5 minutes. Leave to cool.

Butter a deep oven dish. Pour the sauce into it.

Cream the butter and sugar together until pale yellow. Beat in the eggs, then beat in the jam, with the spices and a pinch of salt.

Sift the flour into it a little at a time while beating with a wooden spoon. Stir in the raisins.

Warm the milk and dissolve the bicarbonate of soda in it while stirring.

Stir this into the batter. It will be runny, like a runny cake batter.

Spoon the batter on top of the syrup in the oven dish, without disturbing the syrup; just let it fall gently on top. It will look like it couldn’t possibly turn into a pudding, but it does. I doubted that it would turn out well, but when I opened the oven, there it was.

Bake in the preheated oven for about 40 minutes. Serve with custard. DM/TGIFood

Tony Jackman is Galliova Food Champion 2021. His book, foodSTUFF, is available in the DM Shop. Buy it here. 

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