Sylvia Plath’s perfect lemon pudding recipe
In 1957, Sylvia Plath was fretting about how domesticity had changed her. She poured out her worries in a journal, committing her concern about becoming too “stodgily practical” down in ink.
“Instead of studying Locke, for instance, or writing,” she wrote, “I go make an apple pie, or study The Joy Of Cooking, reading it like a rare novel.” The obvious enjoyment she got from cooking presented a quiet tension. As a figurehead of second-wave feminism, she had clear artistic goals that didn’t involve becoming a full-time housewife.
That tension carries over to posthumous mentions of her cooking. The image most closely associated with Plath in a kitchen involves a tragic suicide. In 1963, in the same room where she was once making her children sand tarts and apple pies, a depressive episode saw her sealing the room with tape and towels to protect them from the leaking gas that killed her.
Still, this is all the more reason to look back on a time when a kitchen was still a comforting place for Plath, where she could have a “four-hour morning ahead, whole as a pie”.
Cooking underpinned her most major written works, whether it was the custard and banana bread she made before writing Medusa or her tomato soup cake the day Death & Co was conceived. While putting together Lady Lazarus, which grappled with death and rebirth, periodic breaks were spent making lemon pudding cake. Without getting too needlessly literal, lemon seemed a perfect fit for Plath. Sharp, often bitter, but richer for it.
In Lady Lazarus, she writes: “A cake of soap / A wedding ring / A gold filling / Herr God, Herr Lucifer / Beware / Beware” – seamlessly blending the domestic world with something more sinister. But maybe the most surprising thing about Plath was that she wasn’t always preoccupied with darkness, and sometimes a lemon pudding cake was just a lemon pudding cake, not a poetic device.
The ingredients are simple: the same butter, sugar, and flour combination all great cakes are built on, with the added kick of the lemons. Plath, an ardent reader of The Joy of Cooking, used the recipe from there. Since its release in the 1930s, it has never gone out of circulation, a constant guide for keen chefs everywhere. It’s almost strange to think that Plath was once one of them, coating a countertop in powdered sugar in a brief moment of mental peace between writing.
Sylvia Plath’s lemon pudding recipe:
Ingredients:
- 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
- 2/3 cup granulated sugar, plus more for ramekins
- 1/4 cup flour
- Zest of 1 lemon
- 1 cup reduced-fat buttermilk
- 1/4 cup lemon juice
- 3 egg yolks
- 4 egg whites
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- Powdered sugar and fresh berries, for garnish
Instructions:
- Preheat an oven to 350°F, and while it heats, line ramekins with butter and coat them lightly in granulated sugar.
- Combine what’s left of the sugar with the flour and lemon zest. In a different, larger bowl, whisk the lemon juice, egg yolks and buttermilk before mixing wet and dry ingredients together.
- Beat remaining egg whites to stiff peaks, gently folding them into the mixture without overfolding it. Divide this into the ramekins, sit them in a roasting pan full of hot water and bake for 20 minutes with foil covering them.
- After 20 minutes, take off the foil and continue baking them until they’re firm and golden. Let them cool before flipping them onto plates and serving with powdered sugar.
