Is the pudding stomach a thing, or just an excuse for mealy-mouthed willpower?

And a brilliantly quick and simple main course from a surprising source in Italy

Plaice with olive oil and sage on a bed of mustardy slaw

Hello, and apologies for the late arrival of this week’s newsletter – I have been driving to Tuscany, which took longer than it should have – terrible weather and Swiss motorways in kit-form. And before you feel too jealous, – filling your head with ideas of red wine, pasta and sunshine – I arrived to find my water tank filled with weed, clogging up the pipe and making the water stink of sulphur, and I have spent much of the day hauling it out.  Am now feeling very pleased with myself, but will be mixing only with people who have heavy colds until the tank has refilled with clean water, and I can have a shower.

But on my journey,  I had a very salutary culinary lesson  at the much misnamed  Hotel dei Laghi – chosen a number of years ago for its name alone, but pleasures in Italy often come from surprising sources and once I got over the disappointment that it was a motel on an industrial estate, and wouldn’t recognise a lake if it fell right in, I found it was really quite nice and had a decent restaurant. It is also just off the motorway at a point in the journey where I often need a break, so I have been going back sporadically ever since.

But the lesson was not to do with quality, but simplicity.

I love cooking for friends – and I do it a lot – but I often end up overcomplicating things and not in a good way. Especially for friends who seem to think if they have come for supper they should eat supper at suppertime, and not in time for breakfast the next day.

So I was particularly taken with my main course, which was some  white fish – perch, but it could have been any – gently cooked in butter and sage, and served on a bed of shredded white cabbage in a mustardy mayonnaise.  It couldn’t have been simpler  – when I recreated it the next day, the slaw took about 5 minutes, the mayo, 30 seconds, and the fish 3 – 4 minutes.  And it was really delicious – and very downsizing.   My starter was equally undemanding – a wedge of grilled pumpkin topped with some whipped cream cheese with hazelnuts and balsamic. I have been experimenting with cooking wedges on my griddle – it takes forever, particularly on my wood-fired  range but is rather good – but I haven’t added the cream cheese and hazelnuts, as both are rather calorie dense. As we are right in the middle of pumpkin season, I will see if  I can come up with something else – perhaps with ricotta – because it made a very good starter.

The whole dinner was very downsizing and excellent for vegging up, until it came to pudding, which I absolutely was not going to have.

Why is it that however much you have eaten – and however full you are – when the waitress turns up and enquires if you would like to look at the dessert menu, you are about to decline with a smile that will convey that it is sweet of her to ask, but such a thing is – and always has been – quite out of the question.  And then:  ‘yes please’, you yell, trying not to bounce up and down with excitement, and hoping you won’t let yourself down by ordering two puddings and one spoon.  And if you manage to squeeze out a ‘no thank you’, you feel smug – and miserable – for the rest of the evening.  

How can we so readily tuck into a bowl of cream and sugar, when if the same waitress enquired if we would like another steak – or even another bowl of chips – we would look at her as if she had taken leave of her senses.  

According to Giles Yeo, the genius geneticist at Cambridge University, it’s a bit of our cave-dwelling behaviour – part of our ancient, death-defying need to build up fat reserves.

The idea goes something like this: in order to get fatter you need to eat more than you can burn throwing spears at a woolly mammoth.   A brilliant way of doing that, is at the point you think you can’t eat another thing, you eat another thing. But as you are full, it needs to be small in volume but high in calories, and easy to convert immediately into fat. Ta-da: pudding.

And before you think this is all rather far-fetched, we are not the only creatures to do this: bears do it too.  When they are getting themselves fat, ready for the winter hibernation, if they gorge themselves on salmon, the last few they eat only the skin and the fat; i.e. the densely calorific part. Personally, I’d rather Panna Cotta, but then I am not a bear

The tragedy is that at the time when humans needed their pudding stomach, there was no pudding. And now that the last thing we need is a pudding stomach, the world is awash with puddings, and people paid to urge us to eat them.

So next time the waitress turns up waving fudge sauce and chocolate mousse and spotted dick under your nose, challenge your inner-caveperson to a duel.

N.b. Do not get confused and challenge the waitress to a duel, no matter how much you’ve had to drink.

And yes, on this particular evening, I opened my mouth to say no thanks, and   found myself agreeing that it would be interesting to try the chocolate and chestnut concoction.  So, a tragic lack of willpower, and to supersize the tragedy, it was the dullest bit of cake I had ever had the misfortune to eat.

But even though it had precisely nothing to recommend it, I still ate the lot.

To be specific about the fish on a bed of mustard slaw:

For the slaw:

I took half a white cabbage and shredded it – I used a mandolin, but I could have used a food processor. The important thing is that is very finely shredded; chunky rough-cut doesn’t do. Then I made 20-second stick-blender mayo with light olive oil and a bit extra dijon mustard, and added 2 teaspoons and a bit of salt to the cabbage. Then I mixed it in really well with my hands so that all the strands of the cabbage had a very light coating of mayo: good for downsizing, but also to keep the cabbage fresh-tasting and not clogged up.

For the fish:

I chopped up a few leaves of sage, put them in a pan with 2 teaspoons of olive oil, and when the sage was sizzling gently, I added some plaice and sautéed them gently for a couple of minutes on each side.