Hot Dessert & Sands of Time

Energy Performance Certificates were unheard of in my childhood. Had they been, I'm not sure our leaky farmhouse would have got one at all. There was no attempt to heat the whole house; we clustered around a coal fire during the day and an electric one in the evening. This is not a 'Four Yorkshiremen' narrative - I was anything but deprived - but the robust environment and physical work did mean we burned food calories. Cooked breakfast, two-course mid-day dinner and evening two course cold-meat 'tea' were supplemented with mid-morning sandwiches and cocoa, mid-afternoon cake and a bedtime snack

The dinner-time (i.e. 1pm) pudding was often something (fruit pie, boiled treacle or jam pudding, hot cake with fruit beneath it) with (powdered) custard, but maybe one day in three it was 'milk pudding' (we were a dairy farm, after all). This meant one of: whole rice, semolina, tapioca or ground rice - that is a carbohydrate base, cooked with milk, sugar, maybe a little butter, (and spice? Mmm, not a big thing in our house), sometimes in an oven, sometimes on a hob

These were not eccentric choices; all of them turned up in debased form in school dinners too. But one day in the mid-1970s, someone turned a switch and they all disappeared from the collective memory and every larder in the country. OK, whole-rice pudding has survived as a niche item on nostalgic restaurant menus, but I wonder how many are cooked per annum in the average British household 

All this shameless nostalgia is triggered by finding this cone in an antique shop. It caught my eye because I tongue-in-cheek recommended one to blipper Mima when her digital scales broke down. The headings on the scale brought back the milk puddings, but one or two caused head-scratching

When we made tapioca pudding, my grandmother referred to it as 'sago'. I looked them up: "Sago is a starch extracted from the pith, or spongy core tissue, of various tropical palm stems, especially those of Metroxylon sagu". Tapioca, on the other hand, is the starch from a tropical shrub: cassava, or manioc. But grandma was not so silly; Wikipedia is on her side: sago and tapioca are visually similar, and: "tapioca pearls are often marketed as 'sago', since they are much cheaper to produce".

Semolina is coarse milled durum wheat - the same stuff that makes pasta and cous cous. If you thought groats were ancient coins, so did I! Now I learn they are (or were - does anyone use the word?) the hulled kernels of cereal grains, such as bulgar wheat and pearl barley

The Tala company was founded in 1899 as Taylor Law & Co Ltd. It still exists today, still making measuring cones, after the usual company history of sellouts and takeovers. Much of its manufacturing was in Birmingham for many years. It is now in several locations including (for the second day in succession) Accrington. I think that most people who have heard of them would cite either these cones or their cake icing kits. We have such a kit in the kitchen cupboard, an inheritance from that draughty house, so dating from at least the 1950s; unlike digital technology, it doesn't break