What’s Mallow pudding?

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Mallow pudding is an apricot-flavoured, cake-like dessert popular in the former Dutch colonies of South Africa. It is a baked dish containing mainly egg yolks, butter and jam or apricot preserves. The result is a spongy, moist sweet pudding that is often served with vanilla custard or ice cream. It is an important aspect of South African dessert culture and is most popular in that country’s capital, Cape Town.

The origins of mallow pudding are decidedly Dutch. Dutch settlers brought the pudding to South Africa when they arrived, mostly in connection with explorations of Dutch East India, in the mid-1600s. In some respects, the dessert was a taste of home for European families who were establishing a colony in the hot and dry African climate. Baking was not a common technique among indigenous peoples at the time. Apricots were also readily available, bursting from the trees every summer.

Although the pudding still exists in some iterations in the Netherlands, today it is definitely a fixture of South African cuisine. Today it is popular with all residents, both those originally from South Africa and those of European ancestry. The ingredients are pretty simple and the pudding is easy even for a novice cook.

For the most part, butter, eggs, flour, apricot jam, milk, and a splash of vinegar are the only components of a mallow pudding. The ingredients should be beaten together to form a soft batter, then poured into a baking pan and cooked until firm and cake-like in appearance. In restaurants, the pudding is often made in individual pans or ramekins. At home, it is more common for the dessert to be baked in rounded pans or oven trays.

Malva pudding has a moist, sponge-like custard, largely due to the egg yolks and high jam concentration. It is for this reason that the dish is considered a pudding rather than a cake. Although the pudding can be served on its own, often cut into rough wedges or simply scooped into shallow bowls, many cooks choose to serve it with a rich cream sauce.

It is traditional to make cream sauce, often flavored with a little vanilla, as the pudding finishes cooking. Cooks will poke small holes in the top of the pudding as it comes out of the oven and pour the heated cream sauce directly over the top. The sauce will sink into the holes and soak right into the mallow pudding as it cools. It is customary to reserve even more of the sauce for drizzling over the final presentation.

Vanilla ice cream is a common alternative to heated cream sauce, particularly in the hotter summer months. Chefs presenting mallow pudding topped with ice cream often add an apricot brandy sauce as a finishing touch. Glazed or preserved apricot halves are also a traditional accompaniment.

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