table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Reverse engineering — From Ol’ Blighty, an ice cream flavor to obsess over

(June 28, 2007)  We are down to our last pint of Häagen-Dazs “Sticky Toffee Pudding” ice cream. I knew this would happen eventually, but I guess I was hoping for a reprieve. How, I thought, how could they possibly discontinue such a terrific product? Well, yes, it was one of their “contest” flavors, the ones they run for just a year.

And then they did it. They stopped making their best ice cream flavor, ever. Well, what do you expect? After all, what do they care? They don’t give a hoot about flavors, just profit; they’re a corporation, for crissakes.

Häagen-Dazs “Sticky Toffee Pudding”

GALLERY >

Wait. Stop. Deep breaths.

The story begins with our trip to Yorkshire, England in 2006. We had no budget for Michelin restaurants, and we made our way eating pub food. If you do the research, you can eat very well in pubs. And without going into detail, we almost always had good meals, sometimes at places we hadn’t even investigated. We consumed things we’d only read about, like Pimm’s Cup, gammon, bubble-and-squeak, Timothy Taylor Landlord Ale and Swaledale cheese. All delicious. And some that were even exotic! I will be sentenced to months of alfalfa smoothies and wheatgrass enemas when the Food Police hear about this, but how could I resist “Free Range Pork Belly, Sage and Onion Risotto, Black Pudding, Old Spot Bacon, Scrumpy Reduction”? (That’s all one entrée. “Scrumpy” is a strong cider from Lancashire.)

One of the guilty pleasures of British cuisine is an odd dessert called “pudding.” It really has no parallel in the US. It’s a flour/egg/sugar concoction that can be delicious or disastrous. Seldom the same twice: a kind of puffy sweet soufflé, or maybe a dense sugary tart. Pudding is so ubiquitous in the UK that it is used conversationally as a synonym for “dessert,” as in, “What’s for pudding?”

Then there’s something called “sticky toffee.” Toffee is familiar to Americans chiefly as a form of almond brittle: milk and sugar cooked with butter, crushed almonds added, like the inside of a Heath Bar. Sticky toffee is made with caramelized dates, and it’s rich, sweet and addictive. We had it as an ice cream flavor one day at an ancient abbey, sold in tiny cups from a freezer.

But as a pudding, sticky toffee comes at you from a totally unexpected direction. Dense, chewy, creamy and intensely sweet. And you just know it isn’t something you should be eating, unless you are already overweight and on vacation. Fortunately, I was both.

But then we left the rolling dales and fells of Yorkshire, and the heaths and stone fences, and the charming villages with old graveyards, dark pubs and bitter ales. And on our return, we discovered that there was a new Häagen-Dazs flavor in the dairy case: Sticky Toffee Pudding, now mixed with vanilla ice cream, which gave it a breath of relief from the unremitting sugar. It was even better than in England!

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