Culinary comparison

In Competition No. 2772 you were invited to liken a well-known figure, living or dead, to a foodstuff.

This challenge fell on somewhat stony ground, producing a small if distinguished entry in which politicians featured strongly. Here’s a flavour of George Simmers’s Tony Blair pudding: ‘The inviting exterior has no real content, but is a glossy shell which quickly deflates, degenerating too soon into a brown mess with a bitter aftertaste…’ David Cameron hardly fares better. Tracy Davidson compares him to a sponge pudding: ‘The slightly blotchy, puffy top half struggles to maintain composure and consistency when faced with any heat.’ And for G.M Davis ‘cooled, congealed rice pudding’ brings to mind Ed Miliband’s speeches: ‘earnest, mollifying, predictable, passion-free and somehow glutinous, with the sticky consistency that held cold rice pudding in an inert, reliably dull block.’

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D.A. Prince impressed equally with her ‘Burnt Nortons …the T.S. Eliots of the cheese course — dry, sparely elegant and cerebral in their gritty texture’.

The prizewinners, printed below, are rewarded with £30 each. Top of the class this week is W.J. Webster who pockets the bonus fiver.
 

Richly complex and aromatically fruity, this is a truly Jacobean dessert — Jamesian, if you prefer, though Jacobean gives a more vivid sense of the Old Pretender. Layer succeeds layer in what can only be called a magnificent trifle, embodying the Master in a single confection. It is ‘rooted’, as it were, in a sponge of early experience absorbing the American taste of blueberry conserve mingled with a cranberry tartness and laced, not with the traditional sherry but a measure of bourbon — or indeed Bourbon. What comes next is not, of course, simple English custard but a suitably refined crème anglaise, whose Gallic overtones smooth away any coarseness in the Anglo-Saxon original.