January is the traditional month of detoxification, the weeks in which we forgo all indulgence. And yet, here I am, with 60 odd members of the Pudding Club at the Three Ways House Hotel in the heart of the Cotswolds, faced with the prospect of dining on not one, not two, but seven puddings. I hold no truck with the diet brigade but, surely, this is rather overegging it?
Attempt to revive tradition
The Pudding Club began 25 years ago, the brainchild of the hotel's former owners Keith and Jean Turner. It was a protest against the tiddly little portions being served up in the era of nouvelle cuisine and also an attempt to revive the traditional British pudding.
Since then, the club has earned an impressive reputation, convening here each Friday night and attracting pudding fans of all ages from all over the world — they have had Japanese tourists, hen parties and groups of goths, all arriving in search of the perfect sticky toffee, the queen of apple crumbles.
British eccentricity
The club's enduring appeal is perhaps down to its British eccentricity as much as its excellent puddings; there is something both wonderful and faintly peculiar about sitting in a room with 60 strangers to worship at the altar of the jam roly-poly.
Recently, Waitrose began to stock the club's branded puddings and now the hotel is expanding its repertoire, too, with chocoholic days, walking breaks and photography weekends.
This year, to celebrate the club's anniversary, there will be pudding-making workshops, a country market and a retro pudding evening.
Three Ways House makes for a delicious destination, with or without the puddings; a kind of boutique country hotel, not too sleek, nor too grand and set within some of England's most beautiful countryside. Even some of the rooms are pudding-themed.
I stay in the Oriental Ginger Syrup Sponge room, with its shantung curtains, gingery-stippled walls and a complete pudding recipe on the door.
And so I commence proceedings with great optimism. There is a light meal before the puddingy bit begins and in a move that I shall later regard as cavalier, I even help myself to extra turnip and green beans.
I am sitting beside a club veteran named Richard, who tonight will eat his 100th Pudding Club pudding, and he looks on with the bemused expression of a man who knows better.
Our master of ceremonies is Peter Henderson, who paces the floor with a giant wooden spoon, reeling off the rules of Pudding Club. The first rule of Pudding Club is you may eat only one pudding at a time.
The second rule of Pudding Club is you may have your next helping of pudding only when you have completely finished your last. You must visit the pudding buffet table only by table and invitation; you may not hide surplus pudding in your napkin or in your pockets or behind the curtain; you must remember that the record for pudding-eating was 24 helpings.
Grand entry
The seven puddings are paraded into the dining room with a great deal of ceremony — ginger syrup sponge; winter lemon; Lord Randall's pudding; very chocolate sponge; bread and butter pudding; passion fruit charlotte and spotted dick. There are several pints of custards. Chocolate sauce. Cream.
But I have tactics; yes, I intend to take an approach we might describe as "delayed gratification": I shall begin by eating the puddings I like least, spurred on by the promise of the ones I do like still to come.
And so I start with the smallest portion of spotted dick and custard. I have never eaten spotted dick before and while I am sure this is a fine example of the dish, I immediately feel as if I have eaten a hippopotamus.
Even at this early juncture, I am suddenly unsure whether I even like puddings. Still, I stumble onwards towards bread-and-butter pudding and winter lemon (a tangy sort of sponge) and then two dainty spoonfuls of passion fruit charlotte before I collapse in a heap of suet and failure and custard and pain.
Still, I'm certainly in the minority. As the evening draws to a close, Peter holds a vote for the favourite pudding (42 of the 63 puddingers favoured the ginger syrup sponge) and asks how many of us managed to eat seven puddings or more; my companion and I are among a handful of people who failed. "Wimps!" Peter hisses.
