Review: Not your mom's chocolate pudding
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 5, 2012
As I plan to review four of Ms. Romsey's cookbooks, I think it best to cover the major issue I have with all of them right at the beginning: Measurements and ingredient names.  For the British marketplace, it's not a problem.  British cooks will understand things like cornflour and caster sugar; Americans will have to look them up. Volumes can be a problem. British cooks will know that the pints of liquid referred to are Imperial pints.  Americans will have to do some stepping to come up with the equivalent measurements for some ingredients.  (For the record, an Imperial pint is roughly 20 liquid oz. Thus 1/4 of a pint will be about 5 oz in the UK, not 4 as it is here in the US.) Ingredients listed by weight are simpler, and any cook who routinely uses a scale for baking will have no problems with these.  However I think that it would have been an enormous help to all cooks if the measurements had been converted to metric.The other issue I have, and I don't think this is necessarily a problem with Ms. Romsey's formatting, is that pages will sometimes repeat on my Kindle.  I'll go through the first page of a recipe, turn the page and find most of the information repeated on the next page.  I don't know what causes this issue, but be aware of it as you work. It can be confusing if you're in the middle of a recipe."Pudding" means several things in the UK.  In a broad sense, it means dessert.  "What's for pudding?" means what's for dessert? In a stricter sense, British puddings are not generally like our beloved chocolate, custard, tapioca or rice puddings, but often flour-based baked or steamed puddings with a bit of heft to them.  It's true there's a recipe here for rice pudding, and it looks delicious, but that's the exception rather than the rule.  And custard makes an appearance, but it's an adjunct to the puddings in the book, used rather like a dollop of whipped cream or a scoop of ice cream might be here.British puddings seem homey and comforting to me, the sort of desserts you can sink into.  Many seem based on fruits and nuts, though there are two chocolate-based puddings, and the classic sticky toffee pudding.  This collection also answers the question: "What on earth is spotted dick?" (Boiled suet pudding with dried raisins and currants.)  Jam roly-polys also use suet, so a note might be helpful here.  Suet is not lard.  In order to get suet, you'll need to talk to a butcher.  Don't use bird-feed suet as it will not be fresh, and who knows what's in it?I didn't find this volume quite as appealing as Romsey's other cookbooks, but there are a number of interesting-looking recipes here that I might turn my hand to when I'm hungry for something hot and comforting.