nikitalynn has offered to cook a traditional English dinner next weekend, I volunteered to not only bring but make dessert - Spotted Dick. "Spotted dick is a fine old traditional English dish: a sweet suet pudding, typically cylindrical, and studded with currants or raisins. Its name has made it the target of double entendres as leaden as the pudding itself often is. The first reference to it comes from the Modern Housewife (1849), a cookery book for the middle classes by the French chef Alexis Soyer, who settled in Britain: he gives a recipe, beginning: Plum Bolster, or Spotted Dick--Roll out two pounds of paste...have some Smyrna raisins well washed...' And in 1892 the Pall Mall Gazette reports that the Kilburn Sisters...daily satisfy hundreds of dockers with soup and Spotted Dick'. The origin of dick is not clear, but there are records of its more general use, meaning pudding', in the nineteenth century: an 1883 glossary of Hudderfield terms, for instance, gives Dick, plain pudding. If with treacle sauce, treacle dick. An alternative name, spotted dog, had appeared by the middle of the nineteenth century: For supper came smoking sheep's heads...and "spotted dog," a very marly species of plum-pudding' (C.M. Smith, Working-men's Way in the World, 1854)."
---An A-Z of Food and Drink, John Ayto [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 2002 (p. 321)
Granted I chose this desert specifically for the name because I wanted to see the look on everyone's faces. It was worth it. But now, I need to go the next step, find a good recipe and make it.
Alright people, I'm counting on you -
britgeekgrrl and felder especially. I need a recipe and any advice you can give me. Call your great-aunt Tessie if you must, because I really need help here!Note to self: This recipe from the H2G2 looks pretty good.
