Chocolate Concrete and Pink Custard: A British School Dinner Classic

There are some foods that live in your memory long after the last bite. Not because they were fancy, not because they were complicated, but because they were just right. Chocolate Concrete and Pink Custard is one of those foods.

If you went to school in Britain any time from the 1960s onwards, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. That dense, dark slab of chocolatey biscuit, dusted with a little caster sugar, sitting in a pool of the most extraordinary pink custard. It wasn't pretty. It wasn't supposed to be. But it was absolutely, unequivocally, lush.
The concrete part of the name was earned honestly. Depending on how long it had been in the oven, you were either getting something that melted on your tongue like the best shortbread you'd ever tasted, or something that could quite possibly take a tooth with it. It was a lottery, and we queued up for it anyway.

And the pink custard. Oh, the pink custard. It held mythic status in the school dinner hall, that is, until someone let slip that it was actually strawberry blancmange that hadn't been set properly. Reputation shattered. Didn't stop us loving it.
I've included this recipe in my cookbook because it deserves to live on. It's the kind of pudding that makes grown adults go quiet for a moment when they take the first bite. That particular silence that means I remember this.
The good news is it couldn't be simpler to make. Five ingredients for the crunch, a handful more for the custard, and about twenty minutes in the oven. It's proper old school comfort food, and there's not a thing wrong with that.

​CHOCOLATE CONCRETE
Makes one brownie tin               serves 6-8
200g plain flour
200g sugar
50g butter
50g lard (all butter works fine too)
50g cocoa Pinch of salt

Preheat your oven to 180°C.
Line a brownie tin with greaseproof paper.
Mix all the dry ingredients together in a bowl.
Gently melt the butter and lard, then pour into the dry ingredients.
Use your fingers to rub everything together until it resembles a crumble mixture.

Tip into your prepared tin and press down firmly with your hands until level.
Bake for about 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and mark out slices with a knife while still warm. Sprinkle the top with a little caster sugar.

​PINK CUSTARD
5 tbsp cornflour
3 tbsp sugar
A few drops of pink food colouring
½ tsp strawberry extract or essence
500ml milk
METHOD
Combine the cornflour, sugar, food colouring and strawberry extract in a bowl. Add a little of the milk and whisk to a smooth paste.
Heat the remaining milk in a saucepan until hot but not boiling. Pour into the pink paste, whisk to combine, then return everything to the saucepan.
Keep whisking over a medium heat until the mixture just comes to the boil and thickens to a lovely custard consistency. It won't take long. Remove from the heat and pour straight over your chocolate concrete.

This recipe is taken from my cookbook, Pork Pies & the Perfect Pickle, 260 pages of the British comfort food we grew up with, now available to order online and on Amazon.
Order your copy here