Griesmeelpudding met Bessensap

In my grandmother's second notebook, the grand desserts had their own pages, apple pie with neat handwriting, pudding with egg yolks, little feast-day things. Griesmeelpudding sat elsewhere, among the weekday recipes, written as if everyone already knew it. Milk, griesmeel, sugar, mould. Bessensap beside it in the margin. That little note was the whole Dutch household economy: the cow in the pail, the wheat in the cupboard, the red currants of July waiting in a bottle for a grey day.

The name is not trying to impress you, which is one of its virtues. Griesmeel is semolina, the fine meal of wheat; bessensap is berry juice, and at the Dutch table it usually means the sharp red-currant juice that wakes up anything pale and milky. But let me tell you a secret: this is not nursery food because it is childish. It is nursery food because whole generations learned from it what a proper toetje, a little after-dish, could be. Cheap. Tender. Exact.

The method asks for no theatre, only attention. Sprinkle the semolina into moving milk, or it will clump into little pale pebbles and sulk there. Stir until the spoon leaves a slow track, then let the cold do its quiet work. The sauce must stay tart enough to argue with the pudding. Hou het altijd simpel, always keep it simple: a white pudding, a red sauce, a spoon, and the old pleasure of turning something modest out of a mould as if it were a guest of honour.