Cooking with Coronation Street - Rita's Summer Pudding

Greetings! Here we go with the seventh of our Cooking with Coronation Street blog posts in which we take recipes from this little gem of a book from 1992 and see what they turn out like when cooked at home by Corrie fans. 

This time, our guest blogger Rob Coates has taken up the cookery challenge again, this time to make Rita’s Summer Pudding.

You can follow Rob on Twitter @abfabrobgeek

I was asked by the lovely folk at Coronation Street Blog to make and review one of the recipes in the 1990 Coronation Street Cookbook. I decided I wanted to do a Rita recipe first. Why? Because I love Rita. So I settled on making her Summer Pudding. 

I want Rita to have the perfect life. The perfect husband. To live on the new side of the street where she’d have a little garden to while away her twilight years, sipping Gin & Tonic and, presumably, eating her Summer Pudding.

But Rita wouldn’t be Rita with the perfect husband. Her track record isn’t great. The men sharing her bed over the last 40 years tend to either have an affair (Dennis) or die (Ted). And, in some cases, both (Alan; Len). 

So it’s quite difficult to imagine that she’s had much reason to perfect her Summer Pudding, given all the heartache she’s endured. 

Trams and Brain Tumours aside though, Rita has found the time after getting up at 5am every day to do the papers to create this little fruity treat.

Which brings us round to cooking the Summer Pudding. I say “cooking”... there isn’t much cooking actually involved in this recipe. Which, actually, sounds about right for Rita. I imagine she’s less of a Domestic Goddess and much more of a one-pot stew type person. Which leaves more time for sitting in the Rovers of an evening. And who’d argue with that?

The ingredients:
785g soft fruit
110g caster sugar 
8 slices of white bread

I opted for strawberries, raspberries and blueberries.

The recipe says to add the fruit and sugar to a pan and to heat gently. Without any liquid. Which I though was odd. But as the fruit softened, the natural juices of the fruits were more than adequate.

Meanwhile, cut the crusts off the bread and “butter” the inside of a 680ml bowl. 

Line the basin with the bread, overlapping the slices and pressing them together. 

Decant one cup of the juice from the pan of fruit and put to one side for later.

Pour the fruit into the breaded bowl.

Top the dish with a lid of bread. This was quite difficult to do as it is impossible to press the bread down without pushing the fruit out.

Place a saucer on top of the bowl and weigh it down. Refrigerate overnight.

The following day, tip the pudding out onto a plate then, using the decanted fruit juice, coat the bread so that it’s soaked in juice and the whole thing is bright red. 

Serve with fresh cream. 

And here it is; Rita’s Summer Pudding:

However, when I came to tip the pudding out of the bowl, it didn’t quite work...

So, the picture above of the perfect pudding is actually a mock-up I made of an up-turned bowl covered in bread and fruit juice!

So it didn’t quite work out as the recipe suggested! 

However, the flavour of the fruit filling was delicious. Even if the soggy bread wasn’t. 

My top tip: if, like me, you can’t get the pudding out of the bowl, throw it under the wheels of the nearest tram and head for a G&T at the Rovers! 


Thanks for the idea, Rita, but perhaps you should stick to selling toffees. 

See also: 

• Cooking with Coronation Street, Rita's Lemon Roast Chicken
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Manchester Tart
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Betty's Hot Pot
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Angie Freeman's lentil soup
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Alec's Whiskey Chicken
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Curly's red wine chicken
• Cooking with Coronation Street, Bet and Alec's Guinness Casserole

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