Puddings

Ian McMillan on the language and poetry of puddings - with Lorraine Bowen, Joseph Coelho, Kate Fox, Frances Atkins and Fariha Shaikh.Singer, comedian and songwriter Lorraine Bowen is known to many as the 'Crumble Lady' - her song about cooking crumble won her huge audiences on 'Britain's Got Talent', and went viral on social media. We find out about how the word 'crumble' translates into other languages and Ian offers a Yorkshire dialect interpretation of the 'Crumble Song'.Joseph Coelho shares his spooky pudding poetry and reads a special commission for The Verb - a poem which explores the pleasure of disastrous puddings. His first poetry collection 'Werewolf Club Rules' was published in 2014. What if Emily Dickinson, T.S.Eliot and Maya Angelou took part in a poetry themed bake-off? That's the kind of thought experiment that stand-up poet Kate Fox likes to conduct for The Verb. She imagines their baking - and wonders if you can tell how well a poet will cook from their poetry.D Fariha Shaikh is a New Generation Thinker and Senior Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham. She tells us about the pudding making of emigrant Catharine Parr Traill, born in 1801, who emigrated to Canada and wrote many books on her life there and on natural history, for women readers in particular. Frances Atkins is a Michelin star winning chef. She explains the difference between a pudding and a dessert and argues that descriptive pudding names are most likely to excite the palate.