Lemon Pudding
My first memory of cooking is of making lemon pudding in
Havelock North. I must have been about three because we moved to Hastings in
October 1948. Here is a photo which I think was taken at the time we lived there. I thought I had a more recent one taken in 2008 but now realise I did not take one, probably because the light was wrong when I walked there from the village. The house was much improved and it was no longer in the country. I know my mother did not enjoy living here. She was a city girl and this house was up an unsealed road and almost a mile from the 'village' that was Havelock North. There was only one neighbour: a middle-aged couple who lived across the road. In this photo you can see the side of the sitting room with its two small windows, one on each side of the fireplace. Then there is an 'extension'. The window on the left is the dining room and I assume the one on the right in the kitchen. I did not realise we had tank water but it makes sense and I do remember my mother saying we had a septic tank (I think).
Like most very early
memories this one is short and may have been altered by remembering it during
my adult life. It is dark so must be
winter. I am standing on a stool or a
chair at the kitchen table and ‘helping’ my mother to make a lemon pudding for
my father’s ‘tea’. Tea in New Zealand
English was a word generally used to describe the evening meal. At the time my father worked in Napier which is
about fifteen miles away, so he was out all day. My sister who is eighteen months younger
than me, does not feature in this memory so I expect she had already been put
to bed. I know it was a privilege to be
allowed to help like this. In this memory I am banging the grater to get the lemon rind
off. You also had to scrape at the
grooves on the grater to get enough zest.
I can dimly remember my mother adding things to the mixture: I
think an egg. Certainly the recipe my mother used only had
one egg although I have always used two.
We ate this pudding often so my other memories of making it
may be from other occasions. I remember
that it was cooked in an oval Pyrex glass dish which was then stood in a
roasting dish half filled with water. I
now realise that was a form of bain marie.
My parents received a lot of Pyrex items as wedding presents in
1943. A ship had
arrived in Wellington with a load of Pyrex and there was very little else
available because of the War. In those days
presents were delivered to the home of the bride and her parents in the days
leading up to the wedding (only a fortnight in my parents’ case as when my
father announced he was about to be sent overseas his mother immediately said
‘Why don’t you get married then?’) My parents had been engaged for some time. The presents were then displayed for the guests to admire and I guess people must have gone
to the house specially to do this. I can
certainly remember these visits as a child.
Apparently another guest then arrived at the house with another piece of
Pyrex. When he saw the pile of Pyrex
items he immediately said he would get something else and took the item
away. The replacement was a set of
bellows for the fire. In the days when
the only form of heating we had was an open fire, these bellows were very well
used. But lemon pudding was always cooked in the oval pie dish.
Other things I remember about lemon pudding as we called it,
were that there was a lemony juice under the sponge. I was going to put a link to a recipe on-line
but there are so many that I think you should just Google it. It seems the more accurate name for this
pudding is Lemon Surprise Pudding. Also
the quantities of ingredients differ from one cookery writer to another. Some have as many as four eggs! I think the version my mother made was
probably frugal because, although I do not remember rationing, there was some
in New Zealand. Also lemons were truly seasonal
and only available in the winter. They
were grown in the far north of New Zealand so it was not like the British and
bananas in the forties. And of course we
used salted butter because there was no other kind and as far as I know no
margarine. Food in New Zealand at this
time was definitely superior to that in Europe.
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