British summer pudding

This Summer Pudding recipe from the July/August issue of Vegetarian Times caught my immediate attention when I received it in my mail. It looks elegant but requires little time to put together. In this version, freshly cooked summer berries (I used a mixture of strawberries, raspberries, and blackberries) are ladled into a "bowl" made of sponge cake slices, then the bowl is covered with more cake slices and refrigerated overnight. You serve the pudding by inverting it onto a plate and garnish with more berries. The cake slices take on a rosy tint after soaking up the berry juices. The "wow" moment comes when you cut into the pudding, and the berries burst out of it uncontrollably. The pudding is incredibly moist, lightly sweet, and you get heaps of perfect summer fruits in each bite.

Apparently this summer pudding is a mainstay in the great tradition of British puddings (although it's usually made with white bread). This BBC blog post proclaims the British invented puddings, trifles, and the like. So the British do have something in the dessert arena to rival the French.

Delectable British summer pudding

Like enjoying summer berries, another of my summer rituals is summer reading. I haven't been well-read enough to know before the famed American writer John Updike, who passed away in January this year. But I recently picked up his posthumous collection of short stories, My Father's Tears and Other Stories, from my neighborhood library, and was instantly struck by his extraordinarily adept use of the English language. His writing is hands-down one of the best I've ever read. His depiction of the everyday life of Americans, their love, fear, and trepidations, is piercing, beautiful and sad, yet sympathetic. Savoring his writing is like chewing on good food: it promises layers of complex, intensely gratifying pleasures, and always leaves you with a consummate feeling. Read more about John Updike in this New York Times article.

Writing to savor - John Updike's My Father's Tears