After twenty years of baking this decadent dessert, which I’ve called by a name I’m quite fond of, I must finally, if fleetingly, commit to its spelling. I’ll take its lovely, ambiguous, oral name, so full of interpretation, possibility, and nuance, and relegate it to a finite, deficient, inadequate written one which prevents the mind from wandering.
A Malvalous dessert.
Twenty years ago (wow!) Bob and I took a one-year contract in South Africa. We were given an apartment with two servants, a cat, and pesky baboons (another story), and a rudimentary kitchen. At some point I started baking a dessert recipe that I found in the local alternative newspaper, The Weekly Mail. Part of a flour ad, the recipe had a dull, generic name, something like Snowflake Flour Pudding, or Baked Apricot Pudding. I’ve called it Weekly Mail Pudding ever since but, not having written of it, I’ve never had to spell it. I’m sad that I must now, in order to tell the story of the pudding. Bob and I refer to it so casually that, when I serve it to friends, I forget how odd the name sounds.
Carmelized comfort.
Malva Pudding
That was the first third of the story. The third third is the recipe itself, at the end. The second third is this. A few months ago in Cape Town, I suddenly came to realize that this dessert is properly called Malva Pudding, and is a South African classic of Dutch origin. (I should also mention that pudding is a generic British term for dessert. This one is a moist cake; not at all a custardy pudding.)
Bob and I stopped at a Cape Town cafe for coffee. I sat down and opened the laptop while Bob looked at the treats on offer. He returned to the table with a gorgeous little cake, not much bigger than a muffin. Its deep brown, shiny surface had large pores and a little buttery froth, like an over-tanned face with a smudge of Coppertone. The cake was not decorated or garnished. It looked moist, and smelled like toasty caramel. Makes my mouth water just thinking of it, even now.
“What’s that?” I asked Bob.
“I don’t know, it just looked good,” he said.
“Looks like Weekly Mail Pudding,” I said.
One bite confirmed it. Examining the cafe’s display case, I saw that the cake was labeled Malva Pudding.
Subsequent research indicates that apricot jam is one of the dessert’s defining characteristics. I never sense much flavor from the jam. Therefore, I’ve always used whatever jam I have on hand: ginger, orange, raspberry…. I used pomegranate jam in the one pictured here.
I give you my scrumptious version of this recipe on the conditions that, if you call it anything at all, you call it by its lovely, ambiguous name; that you refrain from writing its name; and that you forget any spelling of the name that you’ve seen here.
The recipe:
Weekly Mail Pudding
1 Egg
1/2 cup sugar (125 ml)
2 T jam (25 ml)
1 cup milk (250 ml)
1 t baking soda (5ml)
1/4 t salt (2 ml)
1 cup CAKE flour* (250 ml) (or “self-rising” flour)
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 350 F. (180 C)2. Butter a glass baking dish, at least 12″ x 7.5″x 2″. (18 x 30 x 5 cm) Preferably a little larger.3. Beat egg and sugar and salt together well.4. Add the jam and mix well.5. Mix the milk and baking soda together.6. Add flour and the milk mixture alternately to the egg mixture, beating well.7. Pour into the greased glass ovenproof dish.8. Cover the dish with a lid of foil.9. Bake for 40 minutes.10. Meanwhile, make the sauce.
Sauce
1 cup milk (250 ml)
1/2 cup water (125 ml)
1 cup sugar (250 ml)
4 oz. butter (125 g)
1 t vanilla (optional) (5 ml)
Directions
1. Place all ingredients together in a saucepan. (Use a large enough pan; say 2 quarts or 2 liters. Don’t walk away; it will boil over!)2. Stir until the sauce boils, to dissolve the sugar.3. Boil mixture for 5 minutes.4. Take the pudding out of the oven, uncover it, and stab it here and there with a knife.5. Slowly pour the boiled sauce over it.6. Return it to the oven, uncovered, for 15-20 minutes or until the pudding is brown.
You might serve the pudding with whipped cream, ice cream, or custard, but I think that’s overkill.
Cape Town’s Table Mountain.
Kitchen notes:
•No cake flour? From 1 cup all purpose flour, subtract 2 T of it. Add 2 T corn starch.
•Yes! you can use soy milk instead of dairy!
•Placing a sheet of foil on the oven floor may save a nasty clean-up.
Is it humorous, or just pathetic? I got a letter in the mail this week from a literary agent. His letter was dated and postmarked April 2009. He was replying to a query I wrote in June of 2000. Yes, almost nine years ago.
My book was published in 2003. Lucky for me, I didn’t need the Regal Literary agency. But I can’t help wondering about other writers who hope for, or have, representation by Regal Literary. How sloppy are they? Even if they don’t lose mail, or tend to reply after long delays, what about their judgment? Or their attention to detail? Did they fail to notice the date on my letter? Did they decide “better late than never”? Did they have a very large slush pile to plow through? Or were they agonizing about how to break the bad news to me.
I wonder, too, about my SASE. I recognized it immediately: my expensive, 100% rag, gray felt envelope, my own return address in my favorite font, favorite color of laser-printed toner. All designed to impress, and still beautiful today. But what about the stamp? The first class stamp I put on that envelope so long ago was worth only 33 cents then. A letter costs 42 cents to mail now. Still, the letter arrived, and without postage due.
When I lived in the Bahamas, I received a letter bearing a two-year-old postmark and the rubber-stamped message: “Found in supposedly empty equipment.” And today, as I write this, I see a story on a postcard arriving after 47 years, good as new, except for the fact that both sender and intended recipient are dead. In the case of Regal Literary, though, they chose to reply after nine years. WTF?
Coogee Beach, Australia— I spend a lot of time on our hotel balcony because the view is spectacular. The weather is glorious and the waves are loud. It’s a fine place to write, with a computer on my lap.
Coogee Beach. Photo by Paola Unger.
I can see a series of little coves just beyond our beach, and each is separated by a rocky promontory. The sea crashes into these dividers in slow motion, and white clouds of spray just hang there, punctuating each rocky spit of land like a period at the end of a sentence.
Hmmm, take that further: the coast is a paragraph, the country a book, a tome, a history since life began. Its sentences are long and the ragged right runs into the sea. Each sentence is an enigma, ending with a question mark shrouded in mist. The one closest to me ends with an ellipsis of rocks…
“Checking out, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Hope you enjoyed your stay. Your bill, sir…”
“How can I owe $670?”
“It’s only telephone charges, sir.”
“But I didn’t make that many calls. 40, 50 maybe…”
“Yes sir, that’s why your bill is $670.”
“But it’s written in the room ‘call 800 numbers free!'”
“Yes sir, 800-numbers are free—”
“They told me ‘no charge for 800 numbers!”
“Right, but—”
“I didn’t call 800! I called only 50 or 60 numbers!”
Maybe it’s a good idea to change the subject. Too much Barcelona negativity. So how ’bout, instead, I share a sign I saw at Cagliari airport (Sardinia) over the baggage conveyor belt? Faithfully translated from the Italian, with the Italian:
ATTENZIONE AL SEGNALE ACUSTICO LUMINOSO DI PREAVOISO MOVIMENTO MASTRO. PAY ATTENTION TO THE ACOUSTIC AND LUMINOUS SIGNAL FOREWARNING TAPE MOVEMENT.
I’ve been listening to essays by George Orwell. Terry, a voracious reader, devoured Orwell after Proust and Vidal, and he’s now working on Paul Bowles. I downloaded some Orwell essays here, but I find that when I’m in front of my computer (which is a lot), I’m either working or making use of the internet, rather than reading material safely stowed on my hard drive. I can read those documents any time. Somehow, though, I don’t.
Then I ran across this hint, which makes it a cinch to convert text to an iTunes audiobook. The hint contains a downloadable script that practically installs itself, then shows up under the Mac’s Services menu. (Although this hint is for Leopard only, it can be tweaked for Tiger.) I’m sure my programmer friends are privately chiding me, but I’m glad that someone wrote and provided a script to make the text-to-audiobook conversion dead simple.
With the stories on my iPod, they’re sure to be listened to, and planes are the ideal place. I can only read so many hours in the dry air of airports and airplanes, before my contacts start sticking to my eyeballs. Right after converting a few files, I flew to Ireland.
At first, the pleasure of listening was only about half the pleasure of reading. I expected that for two reasons. First is that I prefer to read good writing, linger over it, reread lovely phrases. But okay, there’s deep-seated pleasure in being read to, too. I’ve listened to a few audio books lately, all read by their authors, and I enjoyed them, though more for their stories than their writing.
Listening to synthesized speech is not the same as being read to by an author. The lauded new Leopard voice Alex is synthesized and, though his diction is not bad, Alex lacks style, grace, sensitivity, timing, mellifluence, drama, and every other quality that makes George Guidall, my sister’s uncle-in-law, an award-winning reader of audiobooks (more than 800 books to his credit). But…
I got used to Alex’s style. And though it’s not like reading, nor the same as being read to, it’s better than osmosis. It’s better than not knowing the texts at all. It’s like the Cliff Notes version, but delivered slowly, a fleeting association to reunite with later. Maybe.
And now, after listening to a few more essays, I’m happy enough with Alex. I found that slowing his speech by about 15% improves the experience. I’ve converted a 13,000-word article on cybercrime to digest on my next flight.
…
Later: The cybercrime article was good, but I didn’t listen to it on a plane. I listened during a 2+ hour taxi ride from the south of England to London. It was too bumpy to read, too much strobe effect from the shade of trees on a rare sunny day. The cybercrime article, from Wired, was an hour and 22 minutes long. Perfect for the drive.
And: My computer suddenly lost all input and output audio devices. After a little troubleshooting, I removed the SpeakToItunesAudiobook.service from my system and all’s well again. If that was not an anomaly, I will just drop the service in when I need it.
Lastly: In his essay “How the Poor Die,” I was delighted to hear Orwell mention Axel Munthe’s The Story of San Michele. Axel Munthe was a great-grand-uncle of Bob’s, and The Story of San Michele is a great grand-read.
Hong Kong hair salon? Seen from the street: Chinese torture unit, or what?
Can anyone tell me what this contraption is? I took this picture through a window in Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, after a dinner at Spring Deer, the famous and fabulous house of Peking duck. What are they doing to those poor women? Does it hurt? Click the picture for a larger view. I saw several shops in the neighborhood with this weird torture unit visible through the window.
Bob gets fan mail, especially from teenage boys who want to do what he does. We used to get a slew of them every time one of Bob’s tv specials was broadcast. Since YouTube, there’s no longer any pattern to when we get them, but they’re basically all the same. After breathless compliments, they entreat Bob to teach them “to do what you do,” they swear they “won’t use it in a bad way,” and they beseech him for a reply.
Bob is touched by the letters, but they sometimes provoke a scoff. Most kids (people?) have no clue how many hours—years—it takes to hone sleight of hand skills. 99% of these kids wouldn’t have the grit or moxie to persevere and fail repeatedly, in front of people. Bob’s job requires arrogance, cockiness, and audacity, of which he has an abundance.
Bob Arno, 17, likes cigars and cognac?
We’re reminded of the odd and innate characteristics that make Bob do what he does, by this recent email:
Dear Bob,
I don’t know if you can recall me from our grammar school in Stockholm, but we were classmates a few years in the end of our school career. I remember a number of situations from school. One was when you tried to avoid a possible test so off you went to our school nurse. As I was sitting close to the window I had to put my school bag in the window as a signal to you if the test was on or not.
I can also recall some situations when Anders Rignell had a small microphone hidden in his hand and he whispered answers to you, as you had a hidden speaker in your ear. You were quite good on short answers!
Bob Arno, 22, full-fledged pickpocket
In addition, we two made our national service in Uppsala together, though not in the same company. None of us were particularly successful, but you enjoyed your evenings entertaining at a restaurant down town. Sometimes also when we were out on night manoeuvres. I still don’t know how you could escape without anyone noticing. After a performance at the restaurant, back you came without anyone making any fuss about it.
One of my sons, just 13, is interested in magic, pickpocketing and that area. He saw a few clips on YouTube where you steal many things from people. When I told him that I knew you from school he was impressed.
Amusing stories from Bob’s school days. I’m not saying that young Bob was devious, conniving, and colluding (Bob would say it that way; but I say if you don’t mean it, don’t say it; Terry would say you’re framing), but his grammar-school-era traits—maybe wily and cunning are better descriptors—served him well as a neophyte pickpocket and blossoming entertainer. More important is fierce tenacity, indefatigability, and a willingness to follow his instincts. Bob unofficially redesigned his school curriculum to serve his unsanctioned educational pursuits. He went AWOL in the military to perform. No doubt to many he was considered a difficult kid, and to some a ne’er-do-well.
Most (not all) of the kids who write Bob have atrocious writing skills, and I’m referring only to the basics: spelling, composition, punctuation. I know they’re used to texting on their phones, but here they are, writing to a stranger, asking for help. Shouldn’t they put their best effort forward? Here’s an example:
Hello I have never wanted to talk to someone I don’t know OK not true I talk to people at my school that I don’t know I do it all the time I am 17 years old. I cant spell so sorry, i don’t think you will ever read this i wanted to ask you how do you get good at pickpocketing with out going out on the street and doing it can i get good at it? i am sorry for taking up your time or who ever is reading this i just wanted some help so if you can get back to me my e-mail is zeusxxx@xxx or greatandallmightybob@xxx the greatandallmightybob is going to be around longer but if you can send it to both. lol i am acting like you are going to get back to me o and don’t think i am going to go out and pickpocket someone i am not going to i just want to know how if you believe that OK thank you for reading this who ever it is sorry for wasting your time bye
Overheard at the reception desk on the Queen Mary 2:
I’ve been listening to essays by George Orwell. Terry, a voracious reader, devoured Orwell after Proust and Vidal, and he’s now working on Paul Bowles. I downloaded some Orwell essays here, but I find that when I’m in front of my computer (which is a lot), I’m either working or making use of the internet, rather than reading material safely stowed on my hard drive. I can read those documents any time. Somehow, though, I don’t.
