BREAD-&-BUTTER PUDDING

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1638, 7 May 1925, Page 7

BREAD-&-BUTTER PUDDING

(Ely Kathleen O’Brien, in the Daily

Chronicle.)

Varied though human opinion may be on every other matter in the universe, mankind speaks with but one voice on the subject of bread-and-but-ter pudding. Mankind regards it- with contempt and loathing. This being so, it is interesting to speculate why an object so .rightly and universally despised should he part of the normal life of nearly every ordinary household. If there were any divergence of views concerning it, any conscientious uncertainty, any honest doubt, it would be different; but there is none. You have only to hear the full-hearted groan of anguish from the family seated round the table, adults and children alike, when bread-and-butter pudding appears, to be convinced that there are no two minds about it. Yet here is this pagan monstrosity, from which the human heart instinctively turns, actually encouraged to survive through successive generations of men. Why has mankind not organised all its forces to oppose the one foe that is the common enemy of all?

Let us go into this matter of bread-and-butter pudding. Why, at the very mention of the name, does one have an immediate sensation of, repugnance, even of nausea? The term bread-and-butter by itself, without the pudding correlation, conveys no such impression. Bread and butter is a very pleasant comestible; when the bread is fresh and the butter thick, bread-and-butter is infinitely preferable to the average confectionery. But add the pudding termination and one’s flesh creeps.

Perhaps it is because no pains are taken to conceal its basic stodginess, to present it in a form to touch the intellectual imagihatioii, that one has a kind of preliminary bitterness about it, even before it appears, when one learns it is on the menu. If they would add unto )it something that would redeem its unutterable bread-and-butteriness —if they would trim it, garnish it, flavour it, disguise it if they would call it Love-in-Idleness or Twilight Mystery—anything but bread-and-butter pudding—one might bear it more cheerfully. Putting a few sultanas in it is a mere playing with the surface of the evil and shirking the fundamental issue.

I am driven to believe that there must be a kind of corrective character about bread-and-butter, pudding that gives it such a peculiarly sinister place in our lives. Do I not. seem to remember that it was forced upon one, when young, as an antidote to the epicurean indulgence of the previous evening or as a chastisement for some childish peccadillo? I think it must have come in this way to be dimly ,pora>te din the human v cons)iousnes incorporated in the human consciousness with the idea of sin and retribution. There is somehow always a stigma attached to it. You can see, when the maid brings it in, that she herself has this subconscious feeling about it; you can see she is regarding you as a roomful of miserable offenders receiving their just deserts. Probably this is why it is not made more attractive and toothsome; that would be a mere display of weakness, a vacillating indulgence of crime.

Or it may be just Nature’s way of combating her own excessive productiveness, like shepherd’s pie or rissoles I do not know. I only know that there is nothing against which popular feeling is so unanimous, and yet which keeps its perennial grip on the mass of human society.