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Thursday, April 16, 2015

smitten kitchen | maple pudding cake

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maple pudding cake
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smitten kitchen | maple pudding cake

There is a whole catalog of cooking devoted to what to make when you peer nervously into your bank account and find the balance lacking — one could even argue that the affordable preparation and dissemination of nutrients has always been the primary goal of cooking, before we got distracted by $700 blenders and organically milled heirloom cornmeal porridge (ahem, guilty as charged). Yet what better time to celebrate meals that don’t weigh heavily on our wallets than in the hours after our annual reckoning with the IRS? From the world’s cheapest protein (eggs, crispy, scrambled, smashed and omelet-ed with potatoes), to the most humble (beans, in soup, in curries, stews and chilis) to inexpensive cuts of meat, cooked and stretched forever (in tacos, over orzo, Jewish-style or in the heartiest of soups), most of the time when we’re talking about budget cooking, we’re talking, understandably, about dinner. But one cannot survive on stews and slops alone or at least one should not be expected to in the third trimester; somewhere it is written, or at least it is now.

I first came across pudding chômeur, or “unemployed person’s pudding,” one of the most popular traditional Québecois deserts, a few years ago and was intrigued. Like most classic desserts, there’s a story to go along with it, and it is said that it was created during the Great Depression as a comfort food by female factory workers with the kinds of ingredients that could still be found on the cheap — butter, cream and at the time, brown sugar although maple syrup has since become the standard. (Alas, less budget-minded here, but we’re going to run with it anyway.) A biscuit-like cake is dolloped into a veritable lake of maple syrup caramel, then covered with sauce, and baked in the oven until the cake puffs and drowns a little in this sticky mess, and it’s all exceedingly sweet and wonderful, especially with a dollop of tangy crème fraîche at the end to pierce through the sugar assault.