In honor of British Food Fortnight, and realising that it’s been a while since I’ve tried a new traditional recipe, here’s something a little different – a Kentish Lenten pudding.
This dish has a number of different names. You might know it as Folkestone Pudding Pie, Kentish Pudding Pie, Kent Lent Pie… you get the picture. I first came across this several years ago when I was looking into traditional foods from my home county of Kent. It was something new to me but it sounded fairly simple. It’s also fairly interesting from a historical food perspective.
The Pie’s Origins?
For many of us now, Lent is one of those times when we might say that we’ll give up chocolate or wine or something similar. We’ve learned that, during those 40 days leading up to Easter, we are supposed to give up something we like. However, from the earliest days of Christendom right up to the late Tudor period (and beyond for some), two key factors determined diet: what was available to eat and what the Church allowed you to eat. Fast days were scattered throughout the calendar. You’ve heard of eating fish instead of meat on Fridays, but there was once a time when fasting was required in the lead up to many of the year’s Holy days. During the Norman period, Advent was a period of fasting. But the best-known, and most-prolonged, fasting period was Lent, for which this pie is named.
Even so, I’m not entirely sure how accurate the description of this as a Lenten pie is. It does contain eggs, after all, as well as sugar, milk, and butter. The more I think about it, I’m not sure that this pie, plain as it may seem to us, could technically be eaten during Lent!
So it contains a fair bit of dairy. What else is in our Lenten or Kentish Pudding Pie? Ground rice and lemons are two other key ingredients. “Hold on,” I hear you ask. “Ground rice and lemons in the Middle Ages?” Yes! Well, sort of. Lemons were brought back from Palestine during the Crusades and then were imported from Spain. Meanwhile, rice found its way across the channel all the way from Asia as far back as the 11th century. It was used in dishes similar to our modern rice pudding. So the ingredients were available. Even so, they would have been rather limited in terms of availability. In other words, even if this was a traditional dish, the ingredients suggest that it would not have been suited to Lent. Nor would the ingredients have been a part of your average English peasant’s diet.
References
Glyn Hughes offers some more information in his wonderful book, The Lost Foods of England. Incidentally, if you don’t have a copy of this book, go over to his site and buy one. I don’t get a commission or anything; I just love the book and refer to it often. He mentions a reference to the pie in an 1888 issue of Good Housekeeping. There it mentions a Kentish custom of “going-a-pudding-pieing”. Groups of youngsters would wash this down with cherry beer at the local inn. Charles G. Harper later mentions the custom in The Dover Road (1922). According to Harper, the pie was “an old-time Kentish delicacy” once available at any inn during Easter week. Sadly, this is a thing of the past. I quite fancy going out for some pie and cherry beer!
Kentish Pudding Pie – The Recipe
Given that I’m still not entirely convinced about this pie’s true Lenten credentials, I think I prefer to call it Kentish Pudding Pie. It’s easy to make and has a nice lemony flavour.
You will need:
- One pastry pie crust
- 1/2 pint (285ml) milk
- 1 oz (25g) short-grain pudding rice. (I’ve seen some recipes use rice flour instead.)
- 3 oz (75g) room temperature butter
- 2 oz (50g) sugar
- 2 eggs
- zest of a lemon
- 1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
- 1 oz (25g) currants
Line a 9-inch pie dish with the pastry. Fill with baking beans and bake blind for about 15 minutes at 170C (Gas 5).
Bring the rice and the milk to the boil in a small pan and stir until it thickens. Remove from the heat and leave to cool. Cream together the butter and sugar. Add in the eggs and beat well. Stir in the lemon zest, nutmeg, and rice mixture. Scatter the currants across the top of the pie. Bake the pie for 40 minutes.
