Summer Postcards: Summer Pudding

Suzanne presents Muriel with the magnificent dome of scarlet studded with berries that is summer pudding and reveals the dessert's intriguing origins, which lie in 19th-century hydropathy. What inspired the British to deploy a plain, uncompromising pudding made of bread and native fruit as a health food? Suzanne seeks out the original recipe of the pudding, which turns out to be the tip of the iceberg of a history of spa towns and hydropathic hotels powered by the idea of water as a cure-all, and its eccentric and sometimes fanatical Victorian promoters. Fashionable in the 1920s, summer pudding then fell into obscurity until its triumphant restoration to the British repertoire in the 1980s. An asphalt inventor, a knitwear manufacturer and a colonial missionary guest star.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.