It's time for British pudding

"Blessed be he that invented pudding!" wrote Monsieur Misson de Valbourg, a French visitor to Britain in 1690. "To come in (at) pudding-time is as much as to say to come in (at) the most lucky moment in the world."

Ah, for "pudding-time!" It encompasses, in England, the dessert course and all of its possibilities - pies, trifles, tansies, fools, flummeries, betties and tarts - not to mention the cooked, cream-based confection we in the United States call "pudding."

English puddings are a kind of national treasure, so it is fitting that the National Trust, a private, nonprofit organization that works to conserve buildings, homes, castles, archaeological digs, forests, farms, entire villages and (apparently) recipes, preserved the latter in a cookbook.

I found a dog-eared copy of "The National Trust Book of Traditional Puddings" by Sara Paston-Williams (David & Charles Publishers, 1983) in a used bookstore in Canada years ago, and it has held a place of pride on my cookbook shelf ever since. It has taught me about tansies (fruit desserts originally cooked with the eponymous herb) and flummeries ("a slippery pudding related to the syllabub"), milk puddings and boiled puddings, fools (fruit and cream desserts), trifles (layered fruit, spongecake and cream) and duffs (an old word for "dough").

Better still, it has imparted many sweet history lessons: a Bedfordshire Clanger, for example, was traditionally a steamed pastry with meat at one end and fruit or jam at the other, created for the straw-hat makers of Bedfordshire to take to work as a complete meal. Cumberland Rum Nicky "recalls the days in the 18th century when Whitehaven in Cumbria was one of the leading ports in the rum trade."

The word "junket" in "Devonshire Junket" comes from the Norman Conquest - from the French word "jonquette," which refers to the little rush baskets in which the junkets were made. Tewkesbury Saucer Batters is a pudding baked in saucers, which were, the author avers, used for baking small pies and puddings "years before they were used under teacups."

The only problem with this cookbook is cooking from it. It calls for many ingredients not easily available to American cooks - double cream, castor sugar, black treacle, golden syrup, gooseberries, elderflowers and Naples biscuits. It gives instructions such as "roll up like a Swiss roll" and "serve accompanied by Cat's Tongues," which are fairly incomprehensible to most of us in "the colonies."

So imagine my delight when an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned British pudding - one called General Satisfaction - appeared in a brand-new cookbook by an honest-to-goodness British cook, Tamasin Day-Lewis (sister of actor Daniel Day-Lewis). The book is "Supper for a Song: Creative Comfort Food for the Resourceful Cook" (2010 Rizzoli), and if her "puddings" - summer pudding, bread pudding, brown betties and stewed fruits - are any measure, the emphasis is on "comfort."

• Marialisa Calta is the author of "Barbarians at the Plate: Taming and Feeding the American Family" (2005 Perigee). More at marialisacalta.com.