How one of the most popular puddings on the planet was invented in Sussex

Who hasn’t heard of the luxurious and calorific treat Banoffee pie, made from soft toffee, lightly whipped double cream and bananas? But it came about due to a combination of necessity and good fortune.

It was created at the Hungry Monk restaurant in the village of Jevington, between Eastbourne and Lewes, by restaurant owner Nigel Mackenzie and his head chef Ian Dowding in 1971, when they found themselves one dessert short for the menu.

Ian recalled a recipe that a fellow chef had brought back from America called called Blum’s Coffee Toffee Pie. However, it rarely worked as, as Ian recalled, ‘The toffee was made by boiling sugar, butter and cream together to produce a smooth, thick toffee. Sometimes it didn’t set at all, other times it dried like concrete. Then in a conversation with my sister she told me about boiling cans of condensed milk unopened in water for several hours, which produced a soft toffee. A light bulb lit up in my head.”

But even then Banoffee Pie (or Banoffi Pie as it was first named), was still a little way off and could easily have evolved into something very different as the pair experimented with other fruit, including apples, mandarins and oranges, Mackenzie suggested bananas – and Dowding recalled, “Straight away we knew we had a winner.”

In fact, so popular was the dessert that people in London would ring up the restaurant to make sure it was still on the menu. In 1974, the recipe appeared in their recipe book, The Deeper Secrets of the Hungry Monk, which sold over 100,000 copies, and the pudding took the world by storm.

Ian said: “it got to the point when we couldn’t take it off. Within a couple of years I began to see it on a lot of menus of other restaurants. People we knew coming back from abroad reported seeing it on menus in Australia and America and there were even stories of it being served at No 10 and Buckingham Palace. The word ‘Banoffi’ now has the distinction of being listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

"Now every supermarket has a version and there are Banoffi ice creams, biscuits, chocolates and sundry other items – and no, we have never made a penny from it. Even if one of us had been canny enough to trade mark the name, any firm wanting to use the idea would have just thought up another name.

"It would be nice to get a penny for every Banoffi made world wide. I don’t even mind that I won’t be remembered I just like the fact that many years hence someone somewhere will be making a Banoffi pie.”

The Hungry Monk closed in 2012 and became holiday cottages.

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