England can boast two things: its sporting spirit and its love of pudding.

Both are now harmoniously united in the idea of ​​holding a national competition to mark the anniversary of Elizabeth II's accession to the throne, in which a dessert is sought that is worthy of a queen.

The German writer Oscar Schmitz derided England as a “country without music”, but it would be more appropriate to speak of the “country without food” in the descriptions of foreign visitors over the centuries, given the unfavorable image of English culinary arts.

In the travel reports, however, the pudding is always excluded from the complaints about mushy vegetables, sallow soups and tough meat.

At the end of the seventeenth century, the French Maximilien Misson raved about the variety and excellence of English puddings.

Blessed be its inventor, he wrote, because the pudding surpasses the heavenly bread in the desert.

"With the pudding in my stomach"

At that time, pudding was understood to mean rather spicy dishes: offal cooked in animal gizzards, thick soups, all kinds of hearty pasta with beef tallow and meat fillings of the kind to which Shakespeare's Henry IV refers when he describes Falstaff as "roasted king ox with the pudding in the belly" humiliates.

Although these puddings, such as black pudding, pease pudding, steak and kidney pudding and, of course, Yorkshire pudding, which do not exactly contribute to the good reputation of English cuisine, have survived, the term has established itself as a synonym for dessert since the Victorian era at the latest. Long before that, England was known for its fondness for sweets, as evidenced by reports of Elizabeth I's black teeth. England accounted for almost half of European beet sugar consumption, and later also for a large part of sugar cane imports from overseas.

Because of the down-to-earth nature of the food, pudding and britishness are inextricably linked in comparison to the over-the-top French gastronomy, claims the food historian Regula Ysewijn, one of the judges in the race for the best crown anniversary dessert.

Applicants are invited to submit an unpretentious creation that everyone can master and that is linked to an anecdote or a memory.

The aim is to find a dish for the royal palate that will become naturalized as quickly as the chicken salad with ingredients from the Empire, devised in 1953.

The dish was known at the time under the name Coronation Chicken.