I Can’t Stop Thinking About: Marmelo’s Pudim Abade de Priscos Dessert

Remember those nasty pandemic times? The days spent in bed, your brain and body utterly bricked? I got through them with Max Miller. On his Youtube show Tasting History , the American meticulously researches and recreates dishes as old as Roman garum and as young as Anzac biscuits. It’s part cooking show, part sassy history lesson. I binged hundreds of episodes while propped up on pillows.

Imagine my delight when I first visited the Hot-Listed Marmelo earlier this year and found a 19th-century flan with a fun backstory.

The restaurant’s menu draws on Portugal, its former colonies and the wider Iberian region. Chef and co-owner Ross Lusted discovered Pudim Abade de Priscos (Abbot of Priscos pudding) in an old Portuguese cookbook. Later he ate several versions in Braga, a small city in the country’s north.

Father Manuel Joaquim Machado Rebelo, the abbot of the dish’s name, was essentially a celebrity chef – one regularly called on to cook for the royal family and the aristocracy. His monastery, like others at the time, went through an enormous amount of egg whites starching robes, baking communion wafers and clarifying wine. The good father combined the kitchen’s excess egg yolks with sugar, port wine and toucinho, a local bacon analogue, and gently cooked it in a water bath. A hit was born.

Lusted wanted to create a pudim true to the 19th century and initially started with the modern techniques he’d been trained in. “What a disaster,” he says. “We really couldn’t get the texture like what I’d tasted in Portugal. Eventually I turned back time and considered what the abbot would have used to create this delicious dessert – no electric mixers, no convection ovens, very fresh eggs and most likely copper moulds.”

At Marmelo the pork fat is rendered and clarified before baking, adding the same silky, luscious feel that butterfat (from cream) typically provides in a custard. Still, if you’re used to jigglier flans and crème caramels, Pudim Abade de Priscos’s firmer texture might be off-putting. Likewise, the egg yolks, the sticky wine – it’s a lot. Some people will be done after a few bites, and look for a dining companion to share with.

Me? After that initial visit, I returned to Marmelo alone, specifically to devour a caramel-drenched pudim. The only person I’d share one with is Max Miller. Maybe.

Marmelo
130 Russell St, Melbourne
(03) 7035 2999

Hours
Tue to Sat midday–3pm, 5.30pm–9.30pm

marmelorestaurant.com.au/