Spotted Dick

(This is a weekend non-political post)

A friend sent me the following. It was taken from a recorded lecture by composer and musicologist Robert Greenberg:

I know it's a cheap shot to talk about the food of Great Britain, but we must do so, if for just a moment.

We ask: Why should such a sophisticated and culturally diverse nation, one just a few miles away from France, be, by comparison, so gastronomically bereft? How many of us would honestly prefer an English kidney pudding to a French cassoulet? A Scottish cock-a-leekie stew to a fine French bouillabaisse? Boiled beef to a medium-rare chateaubriand?

The names alone of much traditional English fare are enough to spoil even the heartiest appetite. There's likky pie, which is leeks and pork in a puff pastry. There's sillabub, a drink that originated in the 17th century when a milk maid would squirt a stream of warm milk directly from a cow into a bowl of spiced cider or ale, creating a curd on the top. Oh, yum! There's Welsh faggots -- pig's liver made into meatballs with onion, beef suet, bread crumbs and sometimes a chopped apple.

And, of course, spotted dick -- the ingredients of which will remain our little secret for the nonce. Perhaps even two nonces.

I'm told that Greenberg uses this exercise in culinary nomenclature as a way of launching into a lecture on British composers -- although how he gets there from here remains unknown to me.

But I do know dick. Spotted dick, that is. Although I have not eaten spotted dick, I am spotted dick curious.

Spotted dick is a pudding made with suet and small pieces of dried fruit -- an ingredients list which sounds fine to me. The fruit provides the spots. Thus, if someone asks you to eat spotted dick, you know you'll be putting some sort of fruit into your mouth.

The question is: Where did the name "spotted dick" come from? The closest thing to an explanation I've found holds that some blokes used to pronounce "pudding" as "puddink" (or something similar), which, over time, was shortened into "dick." This theory does not explain why the Brits do not have any non-spotted dicks.

I must add that I've eaten quite a few meals in British pubs and have always had a fine time. Pub food can be kind of greasy, but the Guinness makes everything seem marvellous. I've never had haggis, although I intend to do so one of these days just to say I've done it.

And if you still think that British cookery is a dour affair, then you've never seen Nigela Lawson at work. I am also Nigella curious.