Sticky Toffee Pudding

Some puddings are for summer and some are for the kind of evening when the heating's on, the curtains are drawn, and somebody has brought a bottle of something. This is the second kind. A sticky toffee pudding needs weather. It wants rain against the window and a dark garden outside and a long table of people who have given up on pretending they're not going to have seconds.

The dates do most of the work. Soaked in boiling water with a spoonful of bicarbonate of soda, they collapse into something dark and almost savoury, and when they go into the batter they turn the whole sponge a deep, caramel brown that no sugar alone can achieve. The sauce is the other half of the story. Muscovado, butter, cream, a spoonful of treacle for depth. You cook it until it smells like every childhood pudding you half remember, then you pour it over the hot sponge while it's still in the dish and let it soak in. This is not a recipe that rewards restraint.

It's meant to be from the Lake District, from a hotel near Ullswater in the 1970s, though like most beloved recipes there are other people who claim it and you can argue about it over dinner if you want to. What I can tell you is that it's now the pudding Britain asks for more than any other, and I've never put it on a table and had any leftovers to speak of.

I wrote it down in the notebook years ago. The note underneath just says: "November. Friends. Nobody spoke for a while." That's the whole review.