Griesmeelpudding (Semolina Pudding with Redcurrant Sauce)

A griesmeelpudding turned out onto a white plate and drowned in scarlet bessensap is a small piece of Dutch theatre — the pale, trembling dome and the pool of tart red around it, cool and quivering. It is a childhood dessert for most Dutch people, the kind that appeared on Sunday tables and in school canteens, made from nothing more than milk, sugar and a handful of semolina.

The dessert of the lean years

Griesmeelpudding is the very picture of the reconstruction kitchen: cheap, filling, milk-based, and taught to a generation of Dutch schoolgirls in home-economics classes as the sensible way to end a meal. Semolina stretched precious milk into something that felt like pudding, and the ubiquitous bottle of redcurrant juice gave it colour and a sharp lift for almost nothing. That it survived the end of austerity, when richer desserts were suddenly affordable, says something about how deep the taste for it runs.

Getting the set right

Semolina thickens milk by swelling, not by setting like gelatin, so the pudding holds its shape through starch alone — which means the cooking has to go far enough. Stir it until it genuinely pulls away thick from the spoon before you mould it; underdone, it will slump when turned out. The two classic refinements are worth knowing: a whisked egg white folded in for lightness, and above all a mould wetted with cold water, without which the finished pudding clings and tears.

Plain milk, a spoon of semolina, a splash of red — and a country made a dessert it never stopped eating.

The sauce is not optional. The pudding itself is gentle to the point of blandness; it is the tart, glossy redcurrant flood that wakes it up, the sweet-sour contrast that Dutch cooks reach for again and again.