Spotted dick

Spotted dick
TypePudding
Place of originUnited Kingdom
Main ingredientsSuet, dried fruit, flour, sugar, milk, baking powder

Spotted dick is a traditional British steamed pudding, historically made with suet and dried fruit (usually currants or raisins) and often served with custard.

Non-traditional variants include recipes that replace suet with other fats (such as butter), or that include eggs to make something similar to a sponge pudding or cake.

Etymology

Spotted is a reference to the dried fruit in the pudding (which resembles spots). The word dick refers to pudding. In late 19th century Huddersfield, for instance, a glossary of local terms stated: "Dick, plain pudding. If with treacle sauce, treacle dick." This sense of dick may be related to the word dough. In the variant name spotted dog, dog is a variant form of dough.

History

Spotted dick and custard

The dish is first attested in Alexis Soyer's The Modern Housewife or, Ménagère, published in 1849, in which he described a recipe for "Plum Bolster, or Spotted Dick – Roll out two pounds of paste [...] have some Smyrna raisins well washed".

The name "spotted dog" first appeared in 1855, in C.M. Smith's "Working-men's Way in the World" where it was described as a "very marly species of plum-pudding". This name, along with "railway cake", is most common in Ireland where it is made more similar to a soda bread loaf with the addition of currants.

The Pall Mall Gazette reported in 1892 that "the Kilburn Sisters [...] daily satisfied hundreds of dockers with soup and Spotted Dick".

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Spotted Dick". British Food: A History. 23 January 2014. Archived from the original on 15 April 2021. Retrieved 10 March 2022.
  2. 1 2 "What's the origin of "spotted dick"?". The Straight Dope. Chicago Sun-Times. 27 August 2002. Archived from the original on 20 April 2024. Retrieved 10 March 2022.
  3. 1 2 Ayto, John (2012). The Diner's Dictionary: Word Origins of Food and Drink (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 349. ISBN 978-0199640249.
  4. ↑ Newman, Kevin (15 July 2021). Pond Puddings and Sussex Smokies: Sussex's Food and Drink. Amberley Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4456-9707-9.
  5. ↑ Ashley, Leonard R. N. (1968). "Scoff Lore: An Introduction to British Words for Food and Drink". Names. 16 (3): 238–272. doi:10.1179/nam.1968.16.3.238. Archived from the original on 12 November 2024.
  6. ↑ Partridge, Eric (2 September 2003). The Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang (6th ed.). Routledge. p. 5085. ISBN 978-1-135-79542-9.
  7. ↑ Ayto, John (1994). A Gourmet's Guide: Food and Drink from A to Z. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-280025-1.

Bibliography