Plum Bread Pudding From Nigel Slater

There are certain things the English do better than anyone–like tabloid journalism, say, or a royal jubilee with naval flotilla and ladies in crazy hats.

Add to that list a proper wobbly fruit pudding. Nobody does homey, homely and reliably delicious desserts as well as the Brits. And nobody gets our Anglophilic appetite going like cook, columnist and prolific diarist Nigel Slater.

Deeply hued and flavored, Nigel Slater's bread pudding hits all the right notes.

Slater's latest, Notes from the Larder ($40), drops later this month. It's full of predictably enticing, very English offerings (grilled partridge on garlic toasts, fish and potato pie) and the kind of writerly observations not normally found in more prosaic cookbooks. On the need for kneading: "We do it in order to make the dough softer and more elastic, but the feel of the dough in the hand makes you consider yourself a craftsman of some sort, which of course you are."

One entry for September caught our eye and immediately put us in the mood for a nice, brightly colored fruit pudding (see the recipe).

Mold breading pudding to jiggly perfection using our step by step guide above.

Under the heading "Sweet juice: A pudding for autumn," Slater writes that he's always wanted to add plums to his standard berry filling and found the experiment a great success. "With the exception of the slightly fiddly task of removing their pits (and we must) it is a pudding of serious pleasure and inky sour-sweet juice."

The final result is lovely without being conventionally pretty. Bright, purple and very satisfying, it's worth the fiddling.