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Spotted Dick
6 ounces of flour 4 ounces of sultanas or raisins 3 ounces of butter 1 teaspoon baking powder Water Chop the butter as you would suet, and mix into it the flour with the sultanas or raisins, and the baking powder. Add as much water as will make a paste thick enough to roll out, as for roly-poly pudding or jam roll. When rolled out, fold over, and put into a pudding cloth, and boil for about one hour.
A plain boiled pudding whose only trick is the butter: it stands in for the beef suet of the classic version, which is the point of its inclusion in a meatless book. Keep it cold and the crust stays light.
- Weights in cups6 oz flour is about 1 1/3 cups, 4 oz sultanas or raisins about 3/4 cup, 3 oz butter 6 tablespoons. The water is unmeasured; expect 4 to 6 tablespoons for a firm, rollable paste.
- "Chop the butter as you would suet"This is the hinge. Suet is worked into flour in small hard flakes, not rubbed to crumbs, so start with butter straight from the refrigerator and either chop it fine or grate it on the coarse side of a box grater, then toss it through the flour with a knife. Warm, blended butter gives a heavy, greasy crust.
- Flour and baking powderUse plain all-purpose flour, since the teaspoon of baking powder supplies the lift. Self-rising flour on top of the powder means too much leavening, which can give an off, soapy taste and an uneven rise.
- The pudding clothA square of clean unbleached cotton or a doubled square of muslin, scalded, wrung out and dusted generously with flour on the side touching the dough. Roll the pudding up loosely and tie the ends so it can swell; a tight cloth splits the crust.
- BoilingLower it into water already at a rolling boil, keep it at a steady simmer for the full hour, and top up with boiling water so the pudding is never uncovered. Cold water added midway will make the crust sodden.
- Steamed insteadIf a cloth is more trouble than it is worth, pack the paste into a buttered basin of at least 1 1/2 pints, cover with pleated parchment and foil, and steam for about 1 1/2 hours. The texture is close, if slightly denser.
- What it lacksThere is no sugar and no spice in this version, though many contemporary recipes for the pudding do include sugar. The sweetness here has to come from the fruit and from what you pour over it: custard, golden syrup or a jam sauce.
- YieldServes four modestly, three generously. Slice it thickly while hot; it turns stodgy as it cools and is better rewarmed by steaming than by microwave.
Spotted dick belongs to the long English line of boiled suet puddings, the sweet cousins of roly-poly and jam roll that the recipe itself invokes as a model. The name is usually explained as "spotted" for the currants or sultanas studding the dough and "dick" as a dialect word for pudding, sometimes linked to "duff" and "dough"; that etymology is traditional rather than firmly documented. What makes this version notable is the substitution: suet is the raw hard fat from around a beef animal's kidneys, so a kitchen avoiding meat had to find a replacement, and butter chopped cold to imitate suet's flakes was one of the answers reached for, alongside the vegetable and nut fats sold for the purpose. The pudding cloth, rather than a basin, points to an older practice still ordinary in domestic kitchens at the time this book was written.